


Object Lessons: Season 5

by Polly_Lynn



Series: Object Lessons [5]
Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, Christmas, F/M, Family, Fluff, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Holidays, Humor, Male-Female Friendship, Partners to Lovers, Romance, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-20
Updated: 2020-05-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:08:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 24,680
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24284134
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: I recently started rewatching Castle from the beginning, after taking time off after Dialogic. With Dialogic, I chose a line of dialogue from each episode to prompt the story. For these stories, I chose an object from the episode.Although I suppose in my mind these are "in continuity" with one another, one can certainly read them independent of one another.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Series: Object Lessons [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1622947
Comments: 5
Kudos: 10





	1. Decked Out—After the Storm (5 x 01)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Her apartment is a wreck. When she leans on the door and practically falls inside, there’s a moment of panic when she sees what a wreck it is. She thinks he’s been here—Cole Maddox. She thinks he might still be here, and her gun—her personal back-up piece—is across the room, doing no one any good. Unless Cole Maddox is here, and he’s already found the box where she keeps it. 

Her apartment is a wreck. When she leans on the door and practically falls inside, there’s a moment of panic when she sees what a wreck it is. She thinks he’s been here—Cole Maddox. She thinks he might still be here, and her gun—her personal back-up piece—is across the room, doing no one any good. Unless Cole Maddox is here, and he’s already found the box where she keeps it. 

She freezes, too pissed off at the possibility that someone on this most momentous morning after would have the gall to break into her apartment and try to kill her to really even be afraid. But also too pissed off to really have a plan, other than ripping off said would-be murderer’s most convenient limb and beating him to death with it, all the while shouting _How_ dare _you?_

She freezes, but information filters in through the pre-emptive rage. Her apartment is a very specific kind of wreck. There are clothes everywhere— _everywhere_. In fact, as she absent-mindedly turns the deadbolt and fixes the security chain in place behind her, she does the math, and she’s pretty sure the place is strewn all over with more clothes than she actually owns, but nothing else has been touched. 

The throw pillows are on the couch, the books are the shelves. The kitchen cabinets are closed, just as she left them, and other than a scatter of make-up on the narrow counter next to the stove, it’s just clothes. She peels off her jacket. She turns to hang it up, though it’s an absurd little gesture in context. Something slips out of the inside pocket and drops to the floor.

Her bra. Her _nicest_ bra. 

The story falls into place—pieces of the last twenty-four ours have been thoroughly rattled around by everything. They have been swept away by him, by some unknown stretch of hours that simultaneously stretched on forever and felt like the blink of an eye, but it falls into place now. 

Her breath had come quickly in the precinct elevator. For a moment she had mistaken it for fear. She’d mistaken her shaking hands and racing pulse for the conviction that she’d made a mistake. In truth, it had been elation, excitement, determination. 

She had practically stripped in her apartment hallway, frustrated by the difficulty of managing her door’s multiple locks. She’d torn the clothes she’d been wearing from her body. She’d cast aside the filthy, shredded things, rank with fear, and then panicked—not about Cole Maddox, not about leaving behind what had been her life’s work—about what to wear. 

She was always going to him. Always. That much is enough to raise a triumphant, giddy feeling in her from the vantage point of today. A jaunt to the swings in the pouring rain notwithstanding, she was never going anywhere but to throw herself on his mercy. But first, she’d had a crisis over what to wear. It’s . . . comical. 

She’d pulled out everything, apparently. Everything. There are dresses she promised Lanie she’d send to the thrift store ages ago. There are jeans that sit at chalk-outline odd angles, with one leg turned inside out as though she had hopped in them and directly back out again. She must have. There are scarves and yoga pants and dressy tops. There are plain t-shirts and a kind of cropped bustier she has no memory of owning. There are blazers and sundresses and moto jackets by the half dozen, and she remembers now. 

She remembers settling on the bra—something pretty with a pair of matching boy shorts with a lace detail and the same silky stripes running through the fabric. She’d bought the set on a whim a few weeks ago. She remembers circling furiously in search of scissors, a knife, anything to snip the tags off, and she remembers resorting to her teeth in her wild impatience to be ready, to go to him. 

She presses a palm to the flutter in her stomach as she remembers stepping into the closer-fitting shorts, hooking the bra and working her arms into the straps. She’d stood in the bedroom mirror and pressed a palm to the flutter in her stomach then, too, and regarded her own body, criss-crossed with scratches and welts and bruises. She had ached to her very marrow and she had felt beautiful, unburdened, _ready_. 

A laugh bubbles up in her now as she stoops to retrieve the bra. She groans as the move makes her back sing out in pain, but she stoops again and again, gathering everything up, setting everything to rights. 

She ferries clothing to the bedroom, small armful by small armful. It’s all she can manage, but she’s happy in her work. She’s _elated,_ and she loves the sheer ridiculousness of it all. She feels a bittersweet twinge at the thought that she’d have loved to scandalize her mom with it. 

She folds and sorts and stows away everything. She strips off last-night’s clothes, pausing to breathe in the scent of him. She lets them fall to the floor—she leaves them there, unable to bear the idea of putting them with the laundry just now. 

She opens wide, shallow drawer that’s mostly a haphazard mix of everyday bras. She finds her second best one—black lace, sheer and plunging. She builds up from there. She drags an eyeliner pencil in a heavier sweep than Detective Beckett would allow. 

She’s not Detective Beckett now. She waits for a flutter of anxiety to rise, but a knock comes instead. She knows without looking that it’s him. She looks anyway, and sees he’s properly abashed. It won’t save him, but he _is_ abashed. 

She pulls the door open. She cocks an eyebrow, and in her second-best bra, she feels powerful. She feels like the woman he has always seen. 

“You here to apologize for hiding me in your closet?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Oh, what the hell. Super duper extra can’t sleep. So. Bras. Hmmm. 


	2. Impulse—Cloudy With a Chance of Murder (5 x 02)

He’s a little bit at a loss when she pulls back, absolutely asymptotic to a kiss, and says it’s too soon. Kristina Coterra’s boobs still loom too large, as it were, and as she puts space between the two of them, he’s not exactly sure what that means in the short term. He twists in place to face the apartment’s door, her retreating back, the door again. He takes in the wooly socks, what would probably be a rather dowdy nightshirt if she weren’t the most desirable woman on the planet, the in-for-the-night hair, and hitches a thumb over his shoulder. 

“I’m gonna—” 

“You don’t have to go.” She spins on the ball of one wooly-socked foot to face him. “Unless you want—”

“I don’t want,” he says quickly. “But you said it was too—”

“Too soon for _that._ It’s not like _that_ is the only thing we do.” She narrows her eyes, daring him to contradict her. He doesn’t, because it isn’t. It’s just _mostly_ the thing they do, and he has to bite down hard on his tongue to keep the smug grin that’s trying to get him killed from breaking through. “You could stay for a while.” 

He stays for a while. They have a glass of wine. They flip through old movies on cable. They make out on her couch—like seriously, old school, _what-time’s-your-curfew_ make out. _Too soon_ apparently doesn’t cover a lot of territory, not that he is complaining. He’d need to be able to breathe to complain, for one thing, and there’s not a lot of _that_ going on in this teenage fantasyland. 

“I should go.” He can hardly hear his own murmur over Cary Grant saying something devastatingly charming to Grace Kelly in the background. “It’s late.” 

“Go?” She looks up at him, puzzled. She’s pressed back against the couch cushions, her body tousled and flushed, and doesn’t have a lot of breath to spare, either. She is delectable, and—oh my God—such a heartbreaker. “What?” 

“A while.” He kisses her, sweet and lingering. “That was the deal, right?” 

“A while,” she repeats. She studies his face, sweeps the hair back from his forehead and studies it. “I’m not still—“ She interrupts herself, chews her lip for a thoughtful second. “I’m not _really_ still—“ 

“Not _really_ still.” He laughs and lifts her fingertips to his lips. “Progress is good.” 

They mutually disentangle their limbs. They get sidetracked along the way. They make out a little more, laughing and pushing and pulling at one another, but they’re at the door, eventually. They’re up against the door, her back pressed to it, his back pressed to it, consumed by memory. 

“You don’t _have_ to go,” she says with her mouth open against the hollow of his throat, her palms stroking down his chest. 

“I don’t have to,” he echoes, his resolve wavering. He catches her hands in his, though and manages through some feat of will to open a small gap between their bodies. “But I can. Just for tonight.” He presses a demure kiss to her forehead and meets the glare he knows is waiting for him with a grin. “You’ll just have to put together tomorrow’s sexy outfit unsupervised, Beckett.”

“How _will_ I manage?” She aims a kick at his shins that he dodges. 

There’s another hundred lingering kisses before he actually makes it out the door. When it closes, he stands with his hand against the frame for a long moment. He pictures her on the other side doing the same, lingering. 

But he tears himself away. He heads home, wondering at the strange impulse that led him to this—tearing himself away tonight—but not really questioning it. She’s not still—she’s not _really_ still about Kristina Coterra. He believes that, and he wants to skip and swing himself around a lamp post, because she doesn’t want them to date other people. 

The latter has more than the former to do with the little voice that piped up tonight when he really could have stayed on that couch forever. She doesn’t want them to date other people. She said that straight out, and he thinks that’s . . . big. He thinks she surprised herself with it, and she might need some time to digest. 

And _he_ might need a little time to . . . settle himself down. Because he wanted to snap _Of_ course _we’re not doing other people, you dummy_. He wanted to stay on the couch forever. He wants to stay every night and steal her things, little by little, and move them into the loft. Or pack _his_ things and move them little by little into her apartment—he’s not picky. He wants to tell everyone they know that they’re together. He wants to swing himself around a lamp post and tell perfect strangers that they’re together. 

But he’s made it home now, so the city is safe from confessions he’s not allowed to make for tonight. He nods to Eduardo, who is on the phone as he heads for the elevator. 

“Mr. Castle!” The doorman hurries across the lobby, lofting a small manila envelope. “Mr. Castle, you’ll need these.” 

“Keys.” He takes the envelope and tips its contents into his hand. “The door is repaired already?” 

“Certainly, sir.” Eduardo looks almost offended at the suggestion that he’s not capable of getting a locksmith and whoever else out in the middle of the night to repair and rekey a door recently kicked in by the very finest of New York’s finest. “As you can see, you have the four copies you requested there, and I’ve kept the fifth for the front desk’s lock box.” 

“Four.” He stares at the keys fanning across his palm. 

“Five total.” Eduardo looks confused, concerned. “That is what you requested?” 

“It is.” He closes his fingers around the keys and slides them back into the envelope. “Thank you, Eduardo.” 

He makes a dash for the elevator that borders on rude. He stabs at the button, willing the door to close before anyone else can get on. He peers into the envelope as though something might lash out, something might bite him. He counts one, two, three, four keys—for himself, for Alexis, for his mother. 

For Kate. 

He is seized with the desire to run all the way back to her place, lamp posts and strangers be damned, and press the key into her hand. He is seized with the desire to fall on his knees and pledge his eternal devotion. 

He really needs to settle himself down. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: There was only supposed to be a little making out. And then a lot about the door. And then there was a lot of making out. Hmmm. 


	3. Lares—Secret's Safe With Me (5 x 03)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The stickman has not yet given up all his secrets. She feels good about that, not bad, she decides. She rat-a-tat-tats her fingernails against the closed metal drawer. She returns the dorky, not-at-all-on-the-down-low wave that Castle gives her as the elevator doors close, and that’s where she comes down on the issue—she feels good, not bad. 

The stickman has not yet given up all his secrets. She feels good about that, not bad, she decides. She rat-a-tat-tats her fingernails against the closed metal drawer. She returns the dorky, not-at-all-on-the-down-low wave that Castle gives her as the elevator doors close, and that’s where she comes down on the issue—she feels good, not bad. 

She culls through her reasoning as she gets down to work, setting her desktop to rights before she heads out for the night. The first thing in the feel-good column is the very fact that the stickman gave up any secrets at all tonight. That’s a twofer, because he—unexpectedly—didn’t push, and she let down her guard. It’s more than a twofer, because after all these years, she’s still thrilled by the way he listens. She gets butterflies in her stomach when she thinks of the way he leans in, with his fist pressed to his mouth, and hangs on her every word. 

It seems antithetical to everything he is—a storyteller and a showman who loves the spotlight—but at least when it comes to her, he’s the best audience in the world. And he’s the _only_ audience she wants for the secrets of the stickman. 

That’s number two in the feel-good column. She’s shared with him something that literally one other person in the world knows. She and her dad have not spoken about the odd, ugly little figure since that frigid, overcast day. But she’s told him now. She’s told Castle, and that intimacy feels surprisingly wonderful. It’s scary, too. It’s vulnerable, and she feels rusty and out of practice at offering anything of herself up, but extending herself to him, spontaneously telling him the bittersweet bits-and-pieces of her own story, feels good. 

The feel-good column has a number three in it. That’s what she decides, even though it’s a little tangled up with the secrets the stickman is still keeping. She feels good about the fact that he was there in the drawer to be found in the first place. She didn’t exactly _intend_ for him to be found, but realistically, the probability of Castle rifling through her desk on any given day is high to say the least, and lately, by extension, the probability of him finding her little friend has been equally high. 

But only lately. That’s the part she didn’t tell him, hasn’t told him, might not tell him until who knows when—the stickman is recent arrival. 

She’s been taking down the murder board in her apartment, bit by bit. It has to be done and she wants to do it. Both are true, and some of it’s easy. The index cards come away from the matte paint of the shutters, or the textured, frosted glass and she turns them face down. The newspaper clippings, the snippets of case files—some of them give way easily. And some things are miserably hard to face. Roy’s photo, the crooked nail with the chain and her mother’s ring slung over it. Those are miserably hard. 

And so she’s been doing it bit by bit, and she’s been shy about it. She’s kept the shutters closed, and she knows he’s noticed. She knows he must have, but he hasn’t asked, and she supposed that’s another secret the stickman has been keeping—what he has to do with all that. 

She hasn’t _just_ been taking down, dismantling, putting away. She’s been . . . excavating, because it feels fair, it feels healthy, it feels _good._ She’s been going through boxes that survived the destruction of her last apartment because they were stowed away so thoroughly out of easy reach. She’s been handling awkward snapshots from a point-and-shoot camera she’d had back then. She’s been handling cards and letters her mom sent her at Stanford. 

It’s no simple thing, but she’s been trying to dwell in this period that she hasn’t touched in so long—the weeks and months before her mom’s death. She’s gone back over it—her own birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas. The birthday her mother wouldn’t have, just shy of a month after her murder. She’s been trying to unearth the things she has of her mother—tangible and intangible—that she’s kept at a distance all these years. 

That’s where the stickman comes in. He’s the emblem of what she’s achieved since the night of the storm. He’s the symbol of what she’s cast off and what she’s gathering close. He’s the keeper of things that _aren’t_ secret, she realizes now. They’re just private for now.

_When you are ready, you’ll tell me_. 

She smiles to herself, remembering the sweetness of the absolute confidence in his voice. She looks over her desk, satisfied that all is neat and orderly, as it should be. She snaps off the desk lamp and whispers a goodnight to the stickman tucked away in his drawer, even though she feels silly about it. 

She points herself homeward and thinks about the evening hours stretching before her. She smiles at the giddy flutter of anticipation when she thinks about their promised phone call, about falling asleep with his voice the last thing in her ear. She thinks before that she’ll do some more excavation, she’ll add to the store of secrets she’ll tell him and only him when she’s ready. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: I now cannot remember if we ever see the home murder board again. I don’t THINK so, but I will fall on my sword if this is an accidental AU. I do not, however, believe that if the stickman had been around for a long time, Castle would not have found it in one of his riflings. Hmmm. 


	4. Inamorata—Murder, He Wrote (5 x 04

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Don’t forget the candles,” she murmurs in the absolute last moment before sleep claims her. Her voice is bunny-slipper fuzzy, half lost in the pillow, though she makes an effort. She tips her chin toward him and makes an effort to lift her heavy head. “Burn up. Don’t want to burn up.” 

“Don’t forget the candles,” she murmurs in the absolute last moment before sleep claims her. Her voice is bunny-slipper fuzzy, half lost in the pillow, though she makes an effort. She tips her chin toward him and makes an effort to lift her heavy head. “Burn up. Don’t want to burn up.” 

“Definitely don’t want that,” he murmurs back. He grins at the sight of her, sated and slipping off into dreams. At his leisure, he drinks in the exquisite mess they’ve made of the bed, the delightful disarray of bare skin, tangled sheet, bare skin again. He takes her in and lowers his head reverently to drop a promise in her ear. “I won’t forget.” 

He will never forget the candles. He _could_ never forget, and he has to avert his eyes from the sight of her lying there beside him for a moment. He has to cast them up at the ceiling where a hundred flames dance In the wayward breezes that slip in through the French doors they’ve left cracked open so that the sound of the ocean can reach them. He has to look away, because the moment—the crash of even just a recent memory—threatens to overwhelm him. 

It’s not just that she’s beautiful, though he feels actual tears pricking the corners of his eyes, as his head rolls back toward her, and the golden candlelight flickers across the absolute serenity of her sleeping face. She is _so_ beautiful but it’s not just that. 

It’s the sweetness of the gesture in lighting every last candle in the room, in raiding the kitchen drawers and his desk in the study until she’d had absolute armfuls of them. It’s the combination of bashfulness and absolute command in the fluid way she had moved from surface to surface with a loose-fingered grip on the lit taper. It’s the patience with which she’d touched the flame she’d sparked to each wick, one by one, and the funny little conversations he had pretended not to overhear her having with a stubborn wick or a candle more inclined to pop and hiss than to stay lit. 

It’s the luxury he has of watching her openly now, though that still gets him an ear twist from time to time. But tonight, he’d had the absolute privilege of lying there under orders to be still, orders to stay right there and simply _watch_ as her breathtaking legs flashed beneath the flirty swing of the teddy that only just barely brushes the top of her thighs.

It’s the open secret between them that she must have bought that very teddy especially for this trip—their first stolen weekend together. He knows this because she had clipped off the tags and not quite pushed them all the way into the fire. She’d left evidence behind, and that’s the open secret. It’s the certain knowledge that she didn’t _want_ to destroy the evidence—not completely anyway—because she wants him to know she bought it especially for this. 

She wants him to know. She wants him to see the sweet, silly, aching gestures she’s making. She wants to give him the light of one hundred candles, and laugh until she’s pounding his chest with her fists when he whispers sweet nothings about nautical knots into her ear at a . . . heightened moment. She wants him to see that she’s uncertain sometimes and knocked back by the parts of his life she’s just getting to know for the first time, but she’s in this. She’s _in this_ with him, and it’s that—it’s _that._

His hand comes to rest lightly on her back. He feels the miracle of her slow, steady breath. The candlelight touches his skin for a moment, but then he swears—he _swears_ —that all one hundred points of light and dancing shadow call up a breeze that bends them another way, he swears that each and every one twists and bends and dances so that their tongues of gold are lapping at her skin, not his. He doesn’t blame them a bit. 

“I don’t,” he whispers. “Don’t blame you a bit.” 

He settles his body close to hers. He rests on his belly with his head turned toward her in constant anticipation. He watches the eager play of candlelight over her body for who knows how long. Longer than is sensible or safe, surely. A pop and a hiss from one of the tapers on the table snap his eyes fully open. He buries his face in the pillow and groans. The last thing he wants to do is leave the warmth of her side, but there’s no alternative. He swings his legs to the floor and pads to the foot of the bed. 

He huffs out the three flames in the candelabra and breathes an apology, a thank you for all they have revealed. He scurries on tiptoe in the chill of the room to the head of the bed. He extinguishes the flames there with with quick breaths, one after the other. He turns down the gas fire and does a final sweep for any rogue tea lights or chunky scented candles with their wooden wicks. 

When he’s satisfied he’s done his due diligence—he’s kept his solemn vow to her—he slides back between the sheets and curls himself as close to her warmth as he dares. He doesn’t want to wake her, but the wave breaks over her, too. She stirs and blinks at him with wide, expectant eyes. 

“The candles,” She says. She makes a serious, but unsuccessful attempt to lift her heavy head. “Are the candles out?” The effort is too much for her. Her cheek meets the pillow again and her voice is bunny-slipper fuzzy. “Candles. Can’t forget.” 

“Didn’t forget,” he tells her, his lips pressed to her ear. “Didn’t, didn’t, _could’t_ forget, Kate.” He feels sleep lapping at him, body and soul, as though he is the undulating shoreline.. “Not the candles.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: OMG. It’s so late. This probably makes no sense at all. Hmmm.


	5. Fibril—Probable Cause (5 x 24)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lanie—God bless Lanie—comes when she calls, no questions asked. Part of her mind works overtime on that. Part of her mind knows—and hates with a slithering, vision-blackening rage—that there are back-channel phone calls from Esposito, from Ryan, from Esposito again, because they are devastated at having been such harbingers. They are devastated, period, because he is family, because this cannot be happening. 

Lanie—God bless Lanie—comes when she calls, no questions asked. Part of her mind works overtime on that. Part of her mind knows—and hates with a slithering, vision-blackening rage—that there are back-channel phone calls from Esposito, from Ryan, from Esposito again, because they are devastated at having been such harbingers. They are devastated, period, because he is family, because this cannot be happening. 

But for the larger part of her mind—the larger part of who she is right now—it comes down to words she can count easily on two hands.

_Lain, I need—_

_Your place. I’ll be there._

And so she is. With law-breaking speed, she is there. And so she listens, patient and gentle of touch through the tear-clogged, dry recitation about fingerprints, surveillance, the devastating find of the bag at the loft. She listens, silent as the worst of it sends reverberating shocks throughout the world. 

_it was just a couple of weeks after we started seeing each other._

_Oh, sweetie._

And with that in the open, Lanie—damn her—speaks the words that Kate cannot. 

_He had motive._

She drives the nail deep with that simple, needful blow, and then she listens again. With all the mercy in the world, she listens as words so like the ones they’ve both have heard a thousand times fall, desperate, from Kate’s lips. 

_I know him . . . he’s not this._

And then, because she is a friend, even though she is a friend. And then, bless her, damn her. And then, she asks the question that Kate cannot. 

_Are you sure?_

She asks once and only once. She asks that and only that, and Kate is grateful. She is, in spite of everything, giddily thankful that Lanie does not ask why. She does not ask how she can be or what Kate could possibly know that she doesn’t. 

Kate is indebted, truly and deeply. She is _beholden_ to her friend for simply asking _What can I do?_ For going quietly, with the tightest hug in the world as her parting gift. Kate knows she will owe her friend for the rest of her days, because when she goes, she takes Kate’s conviction as her own. She carries it with her into the work that’s yet to be done. 

But in the dark, ruthless moment when the door closes behind Lanie, and Kate stays to compose herself—to reassemble Detective Beckett from the jagged shards of her strewn all over place right now—the thing she’s _most_ grateful for is not having to explain about the tissues. 

Her fingers close around the wad of two, three, four in her hand. She swipes with them at her streaming nose, and she almost laughs, because—God bless Lanie—she didn’t have to explain that she knows _he is not this_ because of the tissues. 

They are fancy. Some have lotion that is easy on the skin, and no scent, because he is particular about such things. He pretends that _she_ is particular, but they both know the truth. Others have no lotion, but they more than hold up to the _X-Tra Soft!_ promise on the label. 

There are boxes and boxes of these tissues strewn around the place— _her_ place, even though she is pretty sure she has never, in her adult life, actually bought a box of tissues—and he has hand selected every one. The patterns are subtle. They are color coordinated. There are no duplicates, and she is unsure how that’s possible, given the fact that they occupy every flat surface. 

There are long, low, one-flat-tissue-at-a-time boxes in the bathroom, on her side of the bed. There are squat, square pop-up boxes near the couch, next to her computer, behind the sink. 

There are fancy tissues in the living room, _Because you cry at movies, Beckett. You cry_ a lot _at movies_ , and she does, these days. Curled in his arms, content and unguarded, she cries at a lot of things. 

There are fancy tissues in the kitchen, _Because your nose always itches the_ second _your hands are in the dishwater,_ and in the bathroom because she’s ruined a dozen washcloths when she’s lazy about taking off her makeup. _This,_ he says, holding up her latest victim for scrutiny, _this is good for nothing and no one._

There are fancy tissues in the bedroom because she loves the flowers he’s filled it with every few days since they’ve been together, but she’s allergic, _And you’re too stubborn to admit it, Kate._

There are fancy tissues—disgusting fancy tissues—wadded up in her hand right now, because she is heartbroken and so afraid, because she feels helpless and she wants to scream at the part of her mind that echoes back every deluded loved one’s insistence that she must be wrong, the evidence must be wrong, everyone else in the whole wide world must be wrong. 

There are fancy tissues, because he is a caregiver to his very bones. He cares for her and his family and the family they have made together, and these—these stupid pattern-matched, color coordinated, ubiquitous boxes of fancy tissues—are the core of her conviction, her certainty that he has not betrayed her, that he could not have done this heinous, unthinkable thing. 

_I know him . . . he’s not this._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Weirdly tough one. Hmmm. 


	6. Facet—The Final Frontier (5 x 06)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He might be off cosplay forever, thanks to his daughter’s drive-by shenanigans, thanks to his girlfriend’s completely unsolicited dot-connecting, thanks to the evil Wonder Twin powers of his daughter and his girlfriend. Not that either one of them would get the reference. Not that either one of them has any idea that the other has diabolical powers, let alone how she has been wielding them of late. 

He might be off cosplay forever, thanks to his daughter’s drive-by shenanigans, thanks to his girlfriend’s completely unsolicited dot-connecting, thanks to the evil Wonder Twin powers of his daughter and his girlfriend. Not that either one of them would get the reference. Not that either one of them has any idea that the other has diabolical powers, let alone how she has been wielding them of late. 

Except. Oh, _shit._ What if the two of them have become aware of one another’s diabolical powers? What if the two of them are officially in league against him? If this is the case, his life is pretty much over. What’s next? Lanie in on the action? His mother? 

He truly wishes the latter of those had not occurred to him, because now he is thinking about his mother getting in on the action. His mind is offering up endless imaginings of what his mother might bust out for occasions like SuperNovaCon, and he is definitely off cosplay forever and ever, Amen. 

Except. 

Except tonight was fun, notwithstanding the unscheduled heart attack and unexpected challenges to his . . . eagerness—not to mention ability—to engage in _Nebula-9_ fantasy fulfillment with her, courtesy of that hideous, just plain _mean_ Creaver mask. The marathon was fun. The _no-time-for-the-costume_ urgency was way, _way_ fun. But before any of that—before they even had their killer—that was beyond fun. 

She’s sound asleep now. She has an incredible smirk on her face, and he’d like to wake her up and tell her that smirks are _his_ thing. He’d _really_ like to wake her up and do his level best to steal it right back, but more than either of those things—for now, anyway—he wants a little while to cope with the brand new crush he has on her. 

She’s never had trouble finding her words with him. If it weren’t so knee-weakeningly hot, in the early going, he might have found it in himself to resent, or at least regret, her facility with words. When it comes insult games and one-upmanship, she is quick on the draw and impeccable of aim. 

And mixed in with all that have been the stories she’s told him with their sparse, devastating details and harrowing economy of language. He has never felt like more of a success, as a writer or as a man, than on those few cherished occasions she has had the grace to share the truth of her joys and sorrows with him. 

But this, tonight, was something different still—something entirely new. 

He’d felt it from the moment she turned away from him to take in the bridge of that starship one last time before her professional world came crashing down on it, and she had to use it to unmask a murderer. It might have been some different kind of sigh from the dozens already in her arsenal. It might have been something in the roll of her shoulders as she turned once again to face him. 

He’d like to think it was something else entirely. He’d like to think it’s simply the stillness and patience that wanting her, being with her, awakens in him. He’d like to think he is better every day with her that passes at opening himself to let in these astonishing moments of happiness. But whatever the sign, the signal, or the starter pistol, he’d known enough from that first moment to shut up and listen. 

That Kate—brand new crush Kate—is not simply passionate. There has never been any shortage of passion in twenty-first century Kate. But tonight’s Kate, the one who took up absolute command of the chair that once upon a time belonged to Captain Max, had been so _com_ passionate to the young woman she once was, the young woman she is letting herself try to be, more and more, and he loves her. He love _this Kate_ for being so kind to, so fierce in defense of, so beautifully articulate in her inimitable way on behalf of _that_ Kate. 

He could have listened to this Kate all night. He _did_ in some sense, as she interrupted their marathon every three-point-two minutes to explain something he just _had_ to know about the show. He weathered he doesn’t know how many shots to the arm accompanied by glares and the _don’t make fun_ admonition, even though he wasn’t—even though he wouldn’t have _dreamed_ of it. 

She’s here with him now, smirk and all, and he relishes the chance to study her, uninterrupted, in the light of the city filtering in through his bedroom window. He’s grateful for the chance to breathe through some of the maximum dork that accompanies falling hard for every new side of her he comes across. 

He’ll wake her eventually. She’s too delicious and that smirk demands an answer. A non-zero part of his brain is too preoccupied with the long smooth legs and and the lofty height of the costume’s hemline, to say nothing of the strange and strangely alluring lucite heels. He’ll _have_ to wake her eventually. 

But for now he’ll lie here, stretched out alongside her with his fists pressed hard against the roller coaster swoop of his insides. For now, he’ll lie here, still and patient, because he’s got a brand new crush on her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: This is a cool ship. Starship captain’s chairs are always cool. Hmmm. 


	7. Camera Ready—Swan Song (5 x 07)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She has a rough night. Not the fun kind. She’s not exactly sleepless. She nods off in that utterly exhausted sort of way and jerks awake every few minutes. And every time, she feels like she’s in the middle of running a marathon—a naked marathon, and her hair is wet, and that’s a huge, terrifying problem. And she’s on a mud track that’s also a down escalator, when she needs to go up, and her phone won’t dial, and anyway, she has no idea who it is she’s supposed to be calling. 

She has a rough night. Not the fun kind. She’s not exactly sleepless. She nods off in that utterly exhausted sort of way and jerks awake every few minutes. And every time, she feels like she’s in the middle of running a marathon—a naked marathon, and her hair is wet, and that’s a huge, terrifying problem. And she’s on a mud track that’s also a down escalator, when she needs to go up, and her phone won’t dial, and anyway, she has no idea who it is she’s supposed to be calling. 

In other words, she’s riddled with anxiety dreams. 

She rolls over and punches the pillow, hard, at the very thought. He stirs beside her and there’s some hope for a brief moment that she can turn this rough night around, as it were, but he abandons her. He simply grabs a fistful of blankets, hikes them up defensively to his chin, and huffs as he rolls on to his side, away from her restless shenanigans. 

Anxiety dreams. It’s ridiculous. She doesn’t do those. She does full-on, soul-excavating, wake-up-howling nightmares about her mom, about the shooting. A cast of characters rotates through those scenarios—her dad murdered, Castle shot, Ryan, Lanie, Esposito, all of them dead one way or another, ultimately at Bracken’s hand, and the bastard smiles smugly out at her on a live Oval Office broadcast. So yeah, she does nightmares, and she does deep, dreamless sleep. She does _not_ do anxiety dreams. 

Except tonight, she does. Nudity features prominently. Her own, certainly—and once again, not the fun kind—but everyone else’s too. Butterfly is freezing on the tundra in her ratty bra and panties and she—Kate—can’t find the horse she needs to save the poor young woman. Esposito’s shirt keeps dissolving, or stretching into shreds, Hulk style. He keeps asking everyone why the Hulk can’t be brown. Lanie’s revealing top reveals all, mid-autopsy, and absolutely no one should operate a bone saw in a push-up bra. 

It cycles like that all damned night. When she runs out of fingers and toes are going fast, she stops counting the number of times she’s started awake with a shout caught in her throat. It finally hits the tipping point where it’s not even worth trying again. 

She tears the blankets from her body and hisses at the cold air of her bedroom. She slams her hand against the clock to cancel the alarm and rips her phone from the charger roughly enough that she’s probably bent the cord. 

She goes to the kitchen for coffee and there’s no coffee. There will be coffee . . . sometime that is not now. It’s set to auto brew and the stupid machine is about as complex as the Large Hadron Collider to operate, and no amount of button mashing will make it brew _now,_ or even reveal to her the mystical time he has it set to brew so that her feet never hit the floor before the steaming mug is safely in her grasp. 

She snarls something nonsensical at the damned machine and stomps off toward he shower instead. She shuts the bathroom door tight and cranks the hot water on. She wants it steamy. She’s still shivering, and now that she thinks about it, that’s his fault, too. He had one of those stupid “smart” thermostats installed, so the heat won’t kick on until . . . whenever she usually gets up? She stands, holding the towel bar, almost literally unable to summon the energy to step into the stream of water that’s just the pleasant side of scalding. 

She finally musters the will to swing her leg over the tall edge of the tub, but she shrinks back from the water. She’s suddenly seized with the memory of wet hair provoking a horrible sense of dread. She manages to get a hold of herself, though. She manages to shower like a normal person. 

She whisks the shower curtain back and he’s there—he’s _right there_ —with his hair sticking up every which way and her coffee in his hand. 

“Up early,” he yawns. 

He’s still too heavy with sleep to have much of a reaction to the Whitney Houston–range scream that exits her body. It’s a good thing, considering the coffee, but it annoys her. The obviously solid night of sleep he’d managed to get _annoys_ her. 

He waits patiently for her to wrap the towel around herself, then presses the mug into her hand, 

“Preening?” He asks with a waggle of his eyebrows. He crowds up behind her in the mirror. “Ready for your close-up, Detective Beckett?” 

She’s downing coffee too quickly for it to be sensible at that temperature. She’s yanking the brush through her wet hair with brutal force, and he is definitely not reading the room. She slams the mug down hard enough on the vanity that she fully expects her life’s blood to start seeping out through hairline cracks. She whirls to face him. 

“No. I am _not_ ready for my close up.” She gestures with the brush, violently and close enough to his face that he staggers back a step or two. “I am not pulling out my extra low-cut top or my three-sizes-too-small henley. I’m not going to strip down to my underwear and lock myself in a closet so a camera crew can find me. I am not _preening_ for some VH-1 Behind the Music wannabes.” 

Her pitch, her intensity, her volume, climb and and climb until it’s all gone. The rage is gone and she just feels _anxious,_ and she hates it. He blinks at her for what feels like a full half minute. She can hear the wheels churning through images her rant has called up. A dreamy expression flits across his face and she knows—she _knows_ —he’s thinking about Lanie’s top. 

She’s going to kill him. She is just about to spring into action and _kill_ him, when he has her suddenly around the waist. 

“Definitely not preening,” he says, his voice low and seductive. With some deceptively simple flick of his fingers, her towel falls away. “But you know what’ll really show those wannabes?” He backs her into the vanity. He hooks a hand under each of her thighs and hoists her up on to it with a move that ought to be incompatible with how sleepy he still looks. “If you show up downright . . . disheveled.” 

“Disheveled,” she repeats faintly. He’s already on the job and it’s hard to think. “That’ll show ‘em.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Wardrobes are objects, right? Hmmm. 


	8. Cabal—After Hours (5 x 08)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He figures it for a long shot when he invites her over for breakfast. 

He figures it for a long shot when he invites her over for breakfast. 

She’s exhausted, of course, after their night on the lam. They’re both flummoxed by whatever’s going on with their parents, and he figures the loft doesn’t have the greatest associations at the moment. But he loves seeing sunrise from _his_ side of things, and he’d really like to pick up where they left off on that frankly very cuddly cab ride all the way in from the Bronx that was leaning in a very promising PG-13 direction by the time they pulled up to the precinct, so he takes his shot. 

“Breakfast would be good,” she says, without hesitation. She looks past him to where their parents, apparently dedicated to keeping it weird, are still talking outside the break room. “Just give me a second, okay?” 

“Sure.” He turns, half intending to follow in case she needs back up, or an escape route, or possibly an alibi in the wake of a mysterious double murder right int he middle of the bullpen, but she lays a hand on his arm, so he clamps down on the urge to pull the fire alarm and stays put. 

She seems to be saying good night to her dad, that’s all, but the situation gets away from her in a hurry. Her dad’s face comes over all stern, and even from here, he can see shell of her ears going red—the blotchy red that says embarrassment is about to give way to anger—but before that can spill over into an already long night, his mother says something, she steps shoulder-to-shoulder with Jim, the two of them very clearly against Kate, and they’re laughing. The two of them are _conspiratorially_ laughing, and that is just flat out alarming.

He puts his head down to dive into the fray, but in a blur of movement he misses almost entirely, Kate is headed his way. She has him firmly by the arm. 

“We’re going,” she says through her teeth, and then they’re in front of the elevator. 

“What—” His head whips back and forth. “Aren’t . . . _they_ going?” 

“They had caffeine.” She jabs ferociously at the already-lit down button. “I don’t know what they’re doing.” 

“Caffeine?” The terrible truth descends on him. “My mother—did my mother touch the espresso machine? Beckett, if she touched the espresso machine, I—“ 

“We’re _going_ ,” she snaps, and the just-arriving elevator seems to agree. She drags him bodily into the car “They teased me,” she blurts as soon as the doors roll closed, and he might believe that she has just stomped her foot if believing she has just stomped her foot weren’t so bad for his health. “My dad was all ‘What will the sleeping arrangements be?’ and then your mom was like—”

“Do you—“ He closes his eyes tight and vigorously rubs the knot of a headache between his brows. “Do you _have_ to tell me what my mother said?” 

She sizes him up, sidelong. “Is what you’re _imagining_ she said worse?” 

“Almost certainly.” 

“Then no.” She brushes past him and has managed to snag a cab heading their way before he’s even through the precinct’s lobby door. “But she totally touched the espresso machine,” she calls over her shoulder.

The director’s cut weird keeps on coming once they slide across the cab’s duct-taped vinyl seat. He leans forward to give the driver the address and sees a chorus line of wobbling hula girls. He turns to her and she turns to him, wide-eyed. He wonders for a an instant if they died back there on the street and this is some shared _Jacob’s Ladder_ thing they’re suffering. He sees the same thought flash across her face before she breaks down, laughing uproariously. 

“We are Soho bound, Sultan,” he manages to get out before he follows her into fits of so-far-beyond tired giggles. 

He overpays the nonplussed cabbie with cash his mother had made him plead for. They wind their arms around each other and stumble like a pair of drunks through the building’s lobby. They laugh and paw at each other through the elevator ride up and down the hall. She has his shirt untucked, he has her coat unbuttoned and his hands all over that silky blouse as they stumble through the door, only to find the loft in absolute shambles. 

“Mother,” he hisses.The dining table is still cluttered with dishes. The kitchen counter seems, somehow, to have accumulated new platters and pitchers and bread baskets that had nothing to do with meal they hadn’t quite finished. “Kate, I’m . . . sorry?” 

His apology already in progress gets derailed by the beeline she makes for the table. She plops down in a chair, struggling out of her coat even as she tries to sift through the scattered cutlery for something that seems clean. She comes up with a spoon and contemplates one of the chocolate-filled ramekins. 

“Good cold, you think?” She pokes the confection with the tip of her utensil. 

“Honestly? Not sure it was good warm,” he says, eyeing the thing with suspicion, as he drops into the seat next to her. 

She shrugs and digs in, though. She takes a bite and another bite. “Breakfast.” 

“This isn’t—“ His shoulders sag. “This isn’t what I had in mind when I asked.” 

She looks at him like he’s crazy. She takes another heaping bite then sets her spoon down. Her elbows land hard on the table and her head sinks into her hands. He’s worried for a second. He’s alarmed, but her chin tips toward him on a rakish angle, and she gives him a lopsided smile. 

“Breakfast,” she says again, and he knows it’s the final word. She lets out a huge yawn. She stretches, and her pretty silk blouse rides up, exposing bare skin. “Now sleeping arrangements.” 

She clambers into his lap and presses her face into his neck. It’s a girlish, unguarded gesture that makes his heart swell and his eyes mist over. He doesn't know if he has exhaustion to thank for it, or the harrowing events they’ve lived through—professional and domestic—tonight. He’s not entirely sure there isn’t some secret ingredient of his mother’s at work, or maybe the contagious magic of dashboard hula girls. He honestly doesn’t care. He folds his arms around her and feels the warmth of the sunrise on his face as it streams through the window. 

“Sleeping arrangements,” he whispers, kissing the crown of her head. “We’ll have to see about that.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Aimless. Hmmm.


	9. Prospect—Secret Santa (5 x 09)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’d asked her to come for Christmas Eve at 12:01 am, the day after Labor Day. He’d pounced on her in bed like an oversized puppy, gazing down at her with adoring eyes, and begged. 

He’d asked her to come for Christmas Eve at 12:01 am, the day after Labor Day. He’d pounced on her in bed like an oversized puppy, gazing down at her with adoring eyes, and begged. 

_You’ll come, right? Of course you’ll come. Say you’ll come._

And she had said she would. She’d laughed up at him and batted him away as he’d damned near smothered her with his enthusiasm. And she’d thought it would be ok. She really had. More than ok, she’d been quietly thrilled that there was no question in his mind they’d still be together three months down the line. She’d been quietly thrilled to find herself so firmly on the inside of the fierce boundary he draws around his family, his traditions. 

She can’t say, even now, when exactly the dread had set in. Not that night—not 12:02 am the day after Labor Day or anything like that, though she’d surely had a twinge somewhere amidst the pleasant butterflies. 

It might’ve been Halloween, or so. With another annual blowout costume party in the books, he’d turned his attention to Christmas with the seriousness of a seasoned military man fighting a war on multiple fronts. The twinge had certainly gotten stronger by then as he’d enlisted her help to bring bins up from storage to form a staging area in the spare bedroom. 

_So I can have my guys bring the ones from the_ off-site _unit to the_ on-site _unit. Strategy is key_. 

She’d blinked at him a good long while at that. She hadn’t been sure whether or not he was kidding, but of course, he wasn’t kidding. Strategy. Staging areas. Off-site and on-site—a very Castle Christmas. 

_No presents,_ she’d insisted, some time right around then. And when his face had fallen, she’d quickly added, _No presents this first year_. And her heart had leapt right into her throat and a dazzling smile had spread across his face, and she knows—she _knows—_ there had been no dread even then. There’d just been a steely kind of joy and certainty that there would be a second year. He knew it and she knew it, and _no presents this first year_ had seemed like more than enough to keep the dread at bay. 

Her birthday, she decides. She’s swirling the glögg in her punch glass and watching the candlelight set the deep red alight. It’s a lovely evening. It’s been an entirely lovely evening, and she’s not sure why she needs to decide when the dread set in. She lifts the glass and the aquavit fumes burn her eyes, so that might have something to do with something. She takes a sip anyway. The fruit and spice burst on her tongue and the liquid burns just the right way going down. 

Through the healing power of glögg, she decides she’s done wondering about dread. She leans back in her chair. She looks around the table at their laughing faces and for a perfect moment, she feels balanced on the head of a pin. She feels simply and entirely glad that she is here—that they all are here—and nothing more. 

But glögg is a harsh mistress. He raises his glass just then. He chimes the edge of it with his knife and insists on a toast to each of them. 

“I want to thank you all for being here. To my mother.” He takes an appropriately dramatic pause and he and Martha eye one another, wary and amused. “To my mother staying with us tonight. And for . . . how many nights running is this now, Mother?” He gets swatted in stereo for that, but he catches his mother’s hand and presses a kiss to her knuckles before turning to Alexis. “To my daughter, for taking pity on me, though I am _not_ a bad poet with obviously nefarious motives.” The three of them given him hell in chorus for that, but his attention is already on her. “And to Kate, for toughing all this out.” 

He’s smiling right into her eyes as he says it. He makes a sweeping gesture to the enormous tree, the garland and everything, and gives a self-deprecating shrug, but he’s simply and entirely happy that she’s here—happy to have her as part of this warm, bright family circle—but he thinks it’s a sacrifice. He thinks she has to tough it out, and it suddenly seems vitally important that he know she’s not. 

She wants to blurt it out. She wants to shout that it’s not like that, but she’s dimly aware it would the glögg talking right now, so she holds her peace. She smiles right back into his eyes and strategizes. 

Her moment comes not too long after. They’re making things up as they go, all of them. There’ll be presents in the morning, not tonight. Martha is too tired for caroling, she says her good nights—complete with an effusive kiss on each cheek for Kate—and climbs the stairs to Castle sarcastically reassuring her that there’s no need to help with clean-up. Alexis, though she’s torn about it decides to call Max to see if he’s still up for a a late-night date, and he is. 

“We can leave this for the morning,” he says as he surveys the dish-cluttered table. He frowns. “Can we leave this for the morning?” 

“Let’s clear, at least.” She nods firmly and tells herself she’s not stalling. She’s not. 

They’re a good team. They make quick work of things, and before long, she’s handing him the last platter. He kisses her on the tip of her nose as he takes it from her, and something about the gesture, or the familiar rhythm, something about the fact that this evening is special—it’s _epic_ —and yet this, the two of them cleaning up, is so ordinary that she can see it stretching out, night after night, Christmas after Christmas until it reaches the vanishing point. 

“I have something for you,” she blurts. She dashes away from him to dig through the coat closet until she finds her own. She’s breathless as she digs the smallish, flat package from the inside pocket. “It’s for both of us.” 

“But you said—” 

He sounds more than a little panicked as he looks down at the sliver wrapping, and she second guesses herself. She questions her strategy and thinks she should have just given it to him a day or two from now like she’d planned to. She’s sure she’s done the wrong thing, when she was the one who’d made such a big damned dread-filled deal over _no presents_. 

“Is it a fuzzy red jockstrap?” he asks suddenly. Her head snaps up. He’s looking at her with an uncertain smile. “You said it’s for both of us.” 

“It is.” 

She finds her courage in his stupid joke. She finds her determination to tell him how she really feels about being here. She reaches out and tears the paper. He blinks at her, surprised—a little offended like the overgrown kid he his—and finishes the job. He lifts the lid of the box and peers curiously at the framed photos, one on top of the other. 

They’re not big—smaller than four by six after she’d cropped them—and neither the frames nor the picture is fancy. It’s just a cell phone snap in simple matching frames she’d picked up at an artist’s stall. 

“Labor Day,” she says, willing her voice not to fail her. “Remember?”

“I remember.” He traces the curve of her lightly sunburned shoulder without touching the glass. “I asked—” His face dims a little, grows guarded. “You didn’t say anything. All that time.” 

“Nothing to say.” She shrugs down at her own smiling face, his smiling face. “I was excited. Almost the whole time, I was really excited, Castle/” She takes the photos from his hands and holds them up side by side. “Right after you asked me, I did these. One for your place and one for mine.” 

“Right after?” He looks at her from beneath his lashes. 

“Right after,” she says, with honesty, with conviction. She sets the photos aside and winds her arms around his neck. She presses her cheek to his and hopes he knows. She hopes he understands: She’s not toughing anything out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Long and disjointed. I would like to blame the drink of my people, but I have not set any fortified wine on fire tonight. Hmmm. 


	10. Accommodations—Significant Others (5 x 10)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He feels like a kid at Christmas when she wheels her luggage through the door. And if he were inclined to worry about things like being greedy, he’d worry right about now, because he more or less just got to be a kid at Christmas over her. But he’s waited a long time for this—they both have—so he’s not about to worry over something so ridiculous. 

He feels like a kid at Christmas when she wheels her luggage through the door. And if he were inclined to worry about things like being greedy, he’d worry right about now, because he more or less just got to be a kid at Christmas over her. But he’s waited a long time for this—they both have—so he’s not about to worry over something so ridiculous. 

“Hi, honey, you’re home!” he calls out instead, and he manages—he _just_ manages—not to clap his hands in delight at the size of the suitcase. 

She travels light. He knows that from LA, from the Hamptons. For someone with her commitment to outerwear and shoes alone—to say nothing of the demands of her advanced Beckettification regimen—she travels almost preternaturally light. But she’s brought a good-sized roller bag for her stay, and he chooses to believe that denotes a certain commitment to playing house that _really_ ups the kid-at-Christmas vibe. 

“Hey.” She comes up with a bright smile for him, though she’s later than she thought she’d be, and she looks tired. He helps her off with her coat, and she leans gratefully against him for a second. “Thanks.” 

“Mmm. My pleasure, m’dame.” He ushers her to the couch. He has her feet up on the ottoman and her boots off before she can open her mouth to protest. He tucks her favorite blanket around her hips and whisks an oversized silver dome off the plate on the end table at her elbow to reveal a stemless wineglass filled with a generous pour of her favorite red, and a plate of assorted chocolate truffles. “Please, take some refreshment while I take care of your bags.” 

“I can . . . get that,” she calls after him, a ridiculous offer he doesn’t dignify with a reply. 

He’s picked up a small, funky piece of furniture he’d seen her eyeing at a place near her apartment. It looks like an oversized vintage suitcase, hard-sided with the big brass flip locks, but it’s actually a small chest of drawers with a mirror that folds up from the top and two wings that swing out to the sides to provide a place for her bedside items. 

He wheels the suitcase right up to it and hesitates. He should—he probably _really_ should—just leave it there for her to unpack. But she’s tucked up on the couch with her wine and blanket and chocolate and is he or is he not a full-service establishment? 

Before he can second-guess himself, he swings the case on to the bed and pops it open. He offloads her neatly stacked underthings and tucks them away in one of the small lingerie drawers before he’s too tempted to paw. There’s full-service, and there’s flirting with suicide. 

Her workout clothes and a couple pairs of jeans follow the unmentionables. There’s plenty of space for them and her sweaters down below. He hangs up a pair of trousers and two blouses and places the few pairs of shoes she’s managed to magic into the roller bag on to the slant-angle rack beneath. He sets her roll-up toiletry bag on the bedside table, then closes up the suitcase and takes peculiar pleasure in hoisting it up and out of the way on to the closet shelf. 

Alexis has made her way downstairs while he’s been gone. She’s tucked into the opposite corner of the couch and the two of them are talking quietly. He can just barely hear the word _sure_ with a rising inflection from his daughter, and _of course_ from Kate as she reaches out a hand to her. He takes another moment to be glad he’s not one to worry about being greedy, then makes more noise than he needs to as he emerges back into the living room.

“Mmm going back to bed.” Alexis rises unsteadily. “Wanted to say g’night to Detective Beckett.”

“Oh, but not to me?” He presses a kiss to her too-warm forehead. 

“No?” she hits out at him blearily. “Already did.” 

“She did. That’s true,” he admits as he drops on to the couch and slings an arm around her shoulder. “So don’t think you're special or anything.” 

“Why would I think that?” She pops a truffle in her mouth and gives him an arch look. “Wine, truffles. Just an everyday thing.” 

“Wait till you see the turn-down service.” He waggles his eyebrows and plucks the glass from her hand to steal a sip of her wine. 

“I think I might like to see that now.” She yawns and takes a huge stretch with pointed toes and fingers reaching for the sky. “Tired. I’m sorry.” 

“Sorry that you want to crawl right into my bed?” He pushes himself up, turning in one motion to tug her upright. “Didn’t even have to bring my _A_ game.” 

“Wouldn't count on that,” she says as she ducks under his arm. 

She snorts and shakes her head at the chocolates he’s left on the pillow and the carefully folded back blankets and sheet. He gets a heavy look and a pinch on the backside when she realizes her suitcase is nowhere to be found. He dances out of the way when her gaze alights on the furniture piece where the nightstand usually sits, but she gives chase. She walks straight into his body and circles his waist with her arms. 

“Castle.” Her voice is muffled against his chest. “You are so . . . _you_.” 

“I am very me,” he agrees, letting out a sigh of relief that if it’s too much, it’s not _too_ too much. 

She peels herself off him sooner than he’d like, but she’s dead on her feet, so he doesn’t resist too much. He hears her laughter bounce off the walls of the en suite when she spies the hotel-sized bottles he’s filled up from the bottles of her shampoo, her conditioner, her lotion that live here anyway, and the soap she likes that he’s gone to the trouble of cutting into tiny rounds and wrapping in flocked tissue paper. 

“You’re crazy,” she says when she emerges again. She’s smiling wide, but positively shuffling with weariness as she clambers into her side of the bed. She flops on her belly and says it again, deep into the pillow she belatedly removes the chocolates from. “You are a _crazy_ person.” 

“Not crazy.” He slides between the sheets next to her and eases his body close to hers. “Just _very_ committed to winning your business, Detective. _Very_ committed.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Does it count if the story is a prequel to the episode? Hmmm. 


	11. Ex Post Facto—Under the Influence (5 x 11)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s a little bit annoying how blasé he is about the passed-out party-goers and cast-off clothing littering Regina Cane’s foyer. It’s more than a little bit annoying that he chuckles nostalgically and advises the one upright guest they encounter on where he might find his pants. But at least they’re back in sync with their shared significant glances when it comes to the pill-popping pop diva herself.

It’s a little bit annoying how blasé he is about the passed-out party-goers and cast-off clothing littering Regina Cane’s foyer. It’s more than a little bit annoying that he chuckles nostalgically and advises the one upright guest they encounter on where he might find his pants. But at least they’re back in sync with their shared significant glances when it comes to the pill-popping pop diva herself. 

She holds on to that as they head back to the precinct, and they’re definitely on the same wavelength when it comes MC Thug, his keen insights on mamas and bodies, and his lighting guy. 

But even throughout that very special experience, she’s wondering somewhere at the back of her brain why, exactly, she needs something to hold on to. It’s the silly movie thing, she thinks. It’s the fact that he appealed to Esposito of all people to back him up on a relationship issue, but that’s stupid, too, because it’s not a relationship issue. It’s . . . a tiff at best that’s left her a tiny bit irritated. 

That’s what she tells herself until they arrive at the morgue and he runs face first into a wall of Lanie. He is himself. He is clueless and far too prone to think out loud, but no more so than usual. But today, Lanie takes offense before he even speaks. She pointedly turns her back to him, the better to whip around and pin you to the wall with a glare, my dear. It startles him. It confuses him. But for Kate, much becomes clear. 

“Good thing these are single use.” He taps the evidence bag bearing the odd-caliber slug once they’re clear of the second set of double-doors. “Otherwise I think I would have caught this back there.” 

His tone says he’s joking. The sidelong, questioning look he gives her as he tries to keep up with her suddenly athletic stride says he’s not quite joking. He’s curious. He’s concerned, but so is she. 

She understands Lanie’s cold shoulder perfectly. In light of it, she understands her own tendency lately to find fault, to let petty irritations build up and boil over, to wreak petty vengeance with terrible romantic comedies, all too well. But she doesn’t want to understand it. She feels cheated out of the time she’s owed in the Land of Denial, and with Lanie’s fury in the mix, she certainly doesn't want to talk about it. So she ignores the obvious. 

It’s just for now, she tells herself. She has no long-term plans to let him twist in the wind or stand by while Lanie does her dirty work for her. She doesn’t like feeling this way. She doesn’t like holding something against him when he’s had no chance to give his side of things, so denial is just for now. 

He comes to it on his own, though. Before she’s ready, the light dawns for him. 

“It’s about Meredith,” he says. 

It’s out of the blue. The boys are off trying to find out why Tyrese Wilton never mentioned his stolen phone. They have the break room to themselves, and it’s out of the blue and not out of the blue at all. 

“Lanie,” he adds, and the way he looks at her, she wonders if he expected her to play dumb—if he figured she’d go on ignoring the obvious. “The . . . extra-spicy murder glares. It’s about Meredith.” 

“What tipped you off?” The words come unbidden. Her only saving grace is the fact that she sounds defeated, rather than world-without-end sarcastic. 

“Holly’s pistol.” He gives her a wry smile. “Something about being shot with one’s own weapon.” He fiddles with his mug, turning it in circles on the sticky tabletop. “Rang a bell all of a sudden.” 

“Castle, Lanie’s just . . .” She trails off with no sense of where she’d meant to go with that particular statement. 

“She’s your best friend. And I’m an idiot.” His sidelong, questioning look is an echo of the morning’s. “Have I said I’m sorry about that? Because I am sorry about that. Especially now that I’m outside Meredith’s lunacy generation field . . .” 

“I know you’re sorry,” she jumps in at last. “I know. And it’s over.”

“Is it?” He scans the hall outside the break room for onlookers and risks hooking her pinkie with his own for a brief moment. “Because I thought it was after your dinner.” He leans in close. “After that mean prank, it felt like we were through it.” 

“We’re through it.” She nudges his knee with hers under the table and wants it to be true. She wants to tell him that she wants it to be true, but the words won’t quite come. 

“Okay,” he says, and it sounds as though he knows what she’s not saying. It always sounds like he knows, and that’s the danger. “If we’re through it, I can take my lumps. And I can live with Arctic Storm Lanie . . .” 

“As long as she lets you live.” She forces more of a smile than she really feels up to and hides it behind her coffee cup. 

“As long as she lets me,” he agrees. He hesitates and gives her a searching look. “And you’ll let me know if we’re not through it.” 

“I’ll let you know,” she says and means it. She really does mean it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The object is Lanie’s palpable rage? This is a hard episode, as I blew everything I had on “Going Under” years ago—that wicked little scarf that could. Hmmm.


	12. Permutation—Death Gone Crazy (5 x 12)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He doesn’t mind being interrogated by the Great Detective Beckett. He doesn’t mind—much—being teased by Kate. He just prefers to be certain which one it’s going to be before the festivities start. 

He doesn’t mind being interrogated by the Great Detective Beckett. He doesn’t mind—much—being teased by Kate. He just prefers to be certain which one it’s going to be before the festivities start. 

“Neither,” she says, and it’s a bald-faced lie. “It’s a simple question: Does that apply to Beau Randolph?” 

But it’s not a simple question. It’s a _complicated_ question, and worse than that, in context, it’s a trap. 

“Jury’s out forever.” That's an evasion on his part, which is an amateur move. Whether it’s Kate or the Great Detective Beckett at work, any attempt to sidestep what is obviously a trap is a _totally_ amateur move. “Beau Randolph is Schrödinger’s jackass—we’ll never know if having a kid could have saved him from a life of unmitigated sleaze.” 

“Unmitigated sleaze,” she echoes with a roll of her eyes. “I guess we’ll never know.” 

She shrugs as if it’s of no interest to her—as though it was merely idle conversation meant to last them the elevator ride down—but he doesn’t buy it. He hasn’t bought any of this as idle conversation, and he supposes he has his answer: It’s been an interrogation, about what he has no idea. Beau Randolph is literally the only topic he’s ruled out. 

“My place?” he asks the second they’re through the lobby doors and out on to the street. He rushes the question, not checking to be sure there aren’t any ears that shouldn’t be privy to the invitation. She gives him a reproving look, but he rushes into the breach. “Alexis ate all the ice cream, so I had to replenish our stores. We are stocked up, and I obviously got your favorite.” 

She’s tempted—by him or the ice cream or the combination of the two, if he’s supremely lucky. She turns her head toward her subway stop. When it swings back around toward him, he can see it’s not at all his lucky night. 

“You have writing to do,” she declares. When he opens his mouth to protest, she shuts him down. “After all that . . . googling of yourself and all that time cyberstalking your daughter, you have writing.” 

She turns and goes, tossing an arch look over her shoulder once it’s clear she means it. It’s Kate teasing him, that’s the figure retreating even now, but he can’t help thinking it’s also the Great Detective Beckett, and her interrogation hasn’t turned up the answers she was looking for. 

He ponders the mystery all the way back to the loft. His mother is in bed, having achieved an uninterrupted final savasana, presumably. He does need to write, so obviously he does anything but that. 

He plays chicken with a browser window, typing his own name into the search box, then back spacing over it, typing the URL for Alexis’s vlog into the navigation bar and letting his finger hover over the return key. He gets out a pad of paper and fills it, longhand, with names and concepts better than College Guys Gone Nuts, then it’s back to the browser tab to consider which domain names he should obviously park on. 

He goes the freezer for ice cream, he opens the refrigerator side for the canned whipped cream, then closes both without retrieving anything. He trails back to the office, not so much feeling sorry for himself as feeling . . . restless. He reaches for his phone to call her—to relaunch the interrogation—then puts it down again. Even with all his time spent procrastinating, she’ll never believe he’s gotten anything written. She’ll be annoyed if he calls, and rightly so. Whether or not he _feels_ like writing, he needs to write for both practical purposes and his own mental health. He just really doesn’t feel like it. 

He spins the office chair a few times and winds up facing the back wall. The boxes and baskets tucked down and away beneath the bookcase hook his attention and give a tug. He follows the pull without question. It's that kind of unsettled night. 

He winds up elbow deep in Alexis-related things. It’s mostly old, old photos and artwork that would get him murdered if she realized he was still holding on to it, but there are report cards, too, and progress reports studded with smiley-face stickers from preschool, from the lunch bunch social club and three or four or ten other things he’d signed her up for because he’d been terrified she’d be lonely, terrified she’d be awkward with kids her own age, because she spent so much time with him, terrified she’d be irrevocably traumatized by how badly he was definitely screwing up fatherhood. 

He’s laughing at himself. He’s pushing down the fear—the memory of it and the thing itself—that's still inclined to well up at the slightest provocation. He’s taking evasive action when he sees it, there among all those silly things, he sees it. 

He handles the glossy paper carefully by the corner. The fuzzy, indistinct image still takes his breath away, all these years later, and even though he doesn’t know up from down from anything, he sees his daughter in it. He sees the perfect curve of her nose and the fingers that he has always found elegant and perfect. He recognizes her and recognizes the moment he became himself. 

He reaches for his phone. He doesn't wait for her hello. 

“It applies.” He sets the ultrasound on the desk before him, happy to endlessly drink in the sight. “It applies to Beau Randolph.”

_“Okay.”_ She says. It’s a quiet response, complete unto itself, but he thinks she’s smiling. He knows she’s smiling. _“Make your case.”_

There’s so much to say to that. It’s a complicated thing, and he may be used to _over_ sharing about fatherhood, he’s not used to sharing about it. He’s never had occasion to share about it. That fact, in itself, seems like something the Great Detective Beckett might have been trying to get at in her interrogation, something Kate might have been trying to get at in her teasing. That fact, in itself, is sort of news to him, and it might be too much for now. It might be too terrifying. 

But there are plenty of places to start, so he starts at the beginning. 

“It changes you.” He touches a reverent finger to the corner of the glossy paper. “From the very first moment, it changes you.” 

_“Like magic, then?”_

There’s a pause before she says it. There’s dissatisfaction, resistance, disappointment that she’ll have to take another run from a different direction, but he rushes into the breach. 

“No.” It comes out firm, adamant, and he knows somehow that it pleases her, that she’s smiling again. “It’s work. It’s constant and it’s hard. But if it changes you—if that first moment changes you—then you’d do anything.” He shakes his head, still loath to admit it, despite his own epiphany. “Beau Randolph made a change.” 

_“He did,”_ she agrees, and he knows that’s behind them. Beau Randolph is behind them, and now the real interrogation begins. The Great Detective Beckett is on the line. _“Work,”_ she says. _“Tell me about that.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Brain spent a lot of time on that bra. One bra per project, Brain, and you have cashed in that chip. Hmmm. 


	13. The Fire Thief—Recoil (5 x 13)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He’s come with fuel for the wood stove this time. He must have noticed her hoodie from before time, when he showed up with celebratory wine. She can’t remember where she put the untouched celebratory wine, but of course, in the middle of everything—in the middle of what must have looked like a nervous breakdown—he had noticed the hoodie. 

He’s come with fuel for the wood stove this time. He must have noticed her hoodie from before, when he showed up with celebratory wine. She can’t remember where she put the untouched celebratory wine, but of course, in the middle of everything—in the middle of what must have looked like a nervous breakdown—he had noticed the hoodie. 

“Shall I?” he says once he has the wood unbundled and re-stacked to his satisfaction. 

He’s been playing it up. He’s been putting on a performance to take her out of herself. He has dramatically stripped off his jacket to reveal one of her favorite forest green shirts. He has killed more time than she would have thought possible unbuttoning his cuffs, laboriously rolling up his sleeves, flashing his bare forearms, flexing his biceps. 

It’s working. To a far greater extent than she would have thought possible, the whole show is working, so she manufactures an approximation of a smile. She focuses on him, right here before her, and makes it linger. 

“Please,” she says, her voice sultry and low. 

It provokes a grin in him. A boyish, happy thing that demolishes his entire Paper Towel Lumberjack routine, and she doesn’t have to approximate the laugh that calls up in her. She doesn’t have to manufacture anything, and this is how they work. This is _why_ they work. 

She watches his technique. She _leers_. Of course she leers, and he checks over his shoulder to make sure she is—to make sure the performance is still working—but she watches, too. She reads a complicated history in the care he takes, in the deliberation of his gestures. 

He’s a child of Manhattan, just as she is. He’s the only child of Martha Rodgers, and flick-of-the-switch gas fires are his inheritance. But this, the careful interleaving of things recognizable even to her as recently deceased trees with the odds and ends of more civilized timber, the precisely crumpled paper and the bits of fluff that will surrender first—that’s all the man he’s made of himself, the mostly solo father of a daughter, a young woman who is absurdly competent, informed, well-rounded. 

She watches. She knows him better. She smiles and dwells in the present. Mostly in the present. 

He reaches for the box of matches on the edge of the bookshelf. It's an off-handed, obvious gesture, but she almost cries out. 

_No. Not those. Please, not those._

She recalls the drag and hiss of the match head against the rough edge and the flame itself coming to life like a decision made. She pictures McManus’s rambling visions set down in squat capital letters packed densely on the page, and the way the flickering light caught the edge of the word son and would not let her eye move on. That had decided her, the short, lucid stretch of a father’s pain, and she’d drawn the deepest breath her life to extinguish that flame. 

She is ashamed. She thinks of Melanie Roger’s sister in tears on the far side of the break room glass, of Gates—Gates, of all people—trying to console the unconsolable, and she is still ashamed. She almost cries out, but the deed is done. There is the drag and hiss of the match head against the box’s rough edge and a flame coming to life. He touches it to the edge of a twist of paper—a single page he’d plucked the remains of her own ramblings—and in his hands, a match is just a match, and the fire he brings to life is a sweet, care-taking gesture. 

It eclipses the horror of Melanie Rogers, stuffed in a barrel and set alight as a minor inconvenience. It silences he nervous tick of the Zippo lighter with the merry crackle of the good, dry wood and the silly tune he pairs with staccato runs of made-up rhymes. Flame leaps from wood to paper to wood and back again, and the roaring heat she’s felt scaling the back of her body since the Town Car erupted in a ball of fire is lost to the pleasant warmth he coaxes toward her with strategic puffs of the fancy, old-fashioned bellows he’d bought the first time he saw—and envied—the wood stove. 

“How’s that?” The hinges of the metal door squeal. He straightens and only belatedly remembers to strike a manly pose, to turn his profile to its best advantage in the ripples of firelight. “Too much? Not enough? Just right if we snuggle under a blanket, which—not to monologue like some common supervillain—is totally a part of my diabolical plan?” 

“Just right.” She reaches a hand out to him. “Come here, and it’ll be perfect.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: For the space of this gushy moment, we ignore Kate’s asphyxiated upstairs neighbors. Hmmm. Also, the title comes from a Hem sent that I love.


	14. Extempore—Reality Star Struck (5 x 14)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The earrings are not a thing unto themselves. That is not the way of the Gift Ninja. The earrings are part of a campaign. And they are . . . a ritual. A reclamation. 

The earrings are not a thing unto themselves. That is not the way of the Gift Ninja. The earrings are part of a campaign. And they are . . . a ritual. A reclamation. 

He didn’t get her jewelry for her birthday. Or, rather, he didn’t _give_ her jewelry for her birthday. The horrifying murder of Tessa Horton was too fresh in his mind and in hers. Their stark opposition on the question of whether or not Jerry Tyson could be counted among the living occupied too much space between them. The hint she’d dropped, that flirty little moment before the world went tilting on its axis, it had all been too raw. 

So he has a bracelet—a platinum infinity bangle—wrapped up and tucked away, and for her birthday he gave her first editions— _The Reluctant Dragon, Five Children and It,_ _The Thirteen Clocks_ —things she read with her grandfather, with her mother. The bracelet will keep. 

He never really entertained the idea of giving it to her for Valentine’s Day. That’s not the way of the Gift Ninja, either—it’ll be for some anniversary she doesn’t know about, something she’ll glare at him for, even as she tugs at the ribbon and tears open the paper. Or maybe it’ll be her half birthday, for a very merry un-birthday. 

The earrings, from the moment he conceived of them—the moment he set out on the hunt—were a prelude to more. He wants to take her out, and not Hamptons out with a pretty sundress for her and a guaybara and linen slacks for him. He wants to take her _out_ out, and that means an up-do and both of them dressed to the nines. It means waiters in swallow-tail coats rushing around to pull out her chair, and a ridiculous amount of ceremony dedicated to choosing and tasting the wine. 

Taking her _out_ out necessarily means taking her _away_ —whisking her off somewhere that _Page Six_ is not an issue. And it’s not that they haven’t had their long weekends or whirlwind getaways when he can see she really needs to put some distance between her and everyday life. But they haven't been on a trip, a real, pull-out-all-the-stops romantic trip where they can go _out_. The earrings are a prelude to that. 

The earrings were . . . 

He severs all emotional ties to the earrings the minute things go south. As soon as Gates puts on her version of that damnably generic blazer, the earrings are tainted. They’re dead to him, and he starts mentally shopping for the real thing—the thing he was really _meant_ to get her, for their first Valentine’s Day together. 

On the one hand, it’s a survival mechanism. He mentally shops because if he doesn’t mentally shop—if he thinks about what happens when the earrings inevitably out them to Gates—he’ll just have to find a nice brick corner of the bullpen to scream into. 

On the other hand, it’s not _just_ a survival mechanism. Now that the earrings have been reduced to simply a thing unto themselves, the demise of the campaign kind of feels like a sign from the universe. 

He thinks back to the bracelet, to the joy of searching for exactly the right thing—gorgeous and unique, to reflect the thought he’d put into it, and yet simple enough that it’s something she might wear every day, something she _could_ wear every day, even at work. 

He still won’t _actually_ give her the bracelet, even though the earrings have been burned. It’s simply not a Valentine’s Day bracelet. But he likes the _everyday_ idea. He likes the notion of something she could wear in plain sight, and he would know, and she would know, and so would everyone else who matters. 

He thinks on it. He ponders, even when the disastrous cat is out of the bag and the damnable box is out of the pocket. His mind is utterly preoccupied with banishing 3XK for good with the presentation of some lovely, workaday piece of jewelry, and that is on the very brink of getting him in trouble. 

She asks him why Gates hasn’t said anything. She tries to interrogate the specifics of the note out of him, even though he’s told her over and over again that it’s ten words and his name and who knows what else. She wants company in her simmering freak out, and he just can’t shift his mind out of shopping mode. 

And then the hammer drops. _Mr. Castle. My Office. Now._

The words certainly give the gift of focus. He stands miserably before the Captain and shopping is the furthest thing from his mind. He is plunged into deep depression at the impending loss, and then he is saved. By the Captain’s utterly bizarre read of the note, the outlandishly expensive and personal gesture, he is saved. 

His mind is flooded so absolutely blank with relief that he almost misses his cue. He almost fails to grab the unexpected, unintentional, utterly _bizarre_ lifeline he’s just been thrown. But he recovers just in time. He mechanically reaches out a hand to accept the box, and he can feel his brain spooling up like a slow-booting computer. 

By the time Gates is grabbing her coat, it’s relaunching the shopping window. His mood rebounds with an almost audible _boing_ and he thinks in small words— _shop, gift, everyday._

And just then, Gates taps her wedding rings. She taps the white gold band and the diamond engagement ring atop it. It is not a thing unto itself. It is simple and not. It's everyday and spectacularly special occasion. It’s something she knows and her husband knows and so does everyone. And that’s where he is all of a sudden. 

Gates taps her wedding rings and his shopping brain—his Gift Ninja brain—grabs hold of an idea. It’s a prelude. It’s part of a campaign. 

It is . . . probably a problem. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Brain has fixed ideas. But you know he’s had his sites set on being Mr. Katherine Beckett for ages. Hmmm.


	15. The Needle Touched Down—Target (5 x 15)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She won’t let Ryan go with her to Greenpoint. She won’t let Esposito or anyone go with her. She needs them on the streets. She needs them working Henson’s known associates and every possible angle on him. She needs them drilling down on the El-Masris’ enemies, activities, finances. She needs them to find something that is not this—not what’s waiting for her. She needs there to be an alternative. And she needs to be the one to face this. She needs to be the one. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's unlikely that this matters to anyone but me, but after I posted the chapter previous to this one, I got . . . well, spoiled isn't the right word, but I always made a point of not seeking out anything that anyone related to the show said—never followed people on Twitter or read interviews. Anyway, I got "spoiled" for the way Marlowe saw the Caskett relationship and it really just bummed me out. It still bums me out. So I abandoned things for a while. I think my disillusionment shows in the stories after this point, so fair warning, I guess.

She won’t let Ryan go with her to Greenpoint. She won’t let Esposito or anyone go with her. She needs them on the streets. She needs them working Henson’s known associates and every possible angle on him. She needs them drilling down on the El-Masris’ enemies, activities, finances. She needs them to find something that is not this—not what’s waiting for her. She needs there to be an alternative. And she needs to be the one to face this. She needs to be the one. 

The fifteen-minute drive takes her eight with sirens, lights, and absolute focus. The scene is already choked with vehicles—federal, as well as a knot of radio cars and unmarkeds that must be from the ninety-fourth. She grips the steering wheel of her unmarked hard enough that she feels something pop in the base of her thumb, and it’s all she can do not to ram the two nearest and plow right through to the tape. 

But she finds a space for the car. She leans her forehead against the wheel for a count of five to steel herself, and all she can think about is how mercilessly she had teased him that morning, about pancakes and denial. She gives herself the count of five to wish she hadn’t teased him, that she hadn’t made him too self-conscious to call and check on her. She gives herself the count of five to contemplate the razor-blade notion that they might have known early that Alexis was missing—that they wouldn’t be hours and hours behind this—if she hadn’t teased him.

There’s the sharp siren chirp nearby, close enough that it seems like it’s dead center in her brain. It just another car arriving—Harris’s people to judge by the tinted windows—but it’s startling enough to propel her from the driver’s seat. 

She mechanically badges herself past the uniform at the tape line. But the second she ducks underneath, she’s at a loss. Her feet root down into the ground. She twists at the waist, torn between finding Harris for the download and facing it, doing what she came here to do. 

Harris finds her. That settles the question. His brutalist, factual style is a mercy, under the circumstances. She listens, nodding mechanically, feeling like the worst kind of useless. She has nothing to say, nothing to contribute. The girls are not there. They are nowhere nearby. The van itself has turned up nothing useful. 

“Nothing useful?” 

She is a wind-up toy, and the phrase turns a key in her back. Her body twists jerkily in the direction of the vehicle. It’s more or less the geometric center of the scene Harris and the ninety-fourth have locked down. It’s the eye of the storm in terms of activity. She can’t understand it. 

“Blood.” She can barely manage the word. “Detective Ryan was told—”

Harris cuts her off. “Plenty of blood inside, and a trail leading away that ends abruptly. That’s our focus.” 

He’s gone, then. There are people in FBI windbreakers on either side of him, saying things low in his each ear, and then he’s gone. 

Her feet make a beeline for the van. She’s come here for this. _Nothing useful_ , she thinks and holds on to grim determination the words call up. She lets it move her to the van’s crushed front bumper, the passenger-side door, to the rolled-open door with the work lights pouring out onto the cracked, buckled asphalt. 

The smell hits her like a fist to the solar plexus. Her fingers just manage to catch the passenger door handle to keep her from going right to the ground. Her eyelids flutter and black presses in on her from all sides. She feels a swell of rage at her body’s betrayal. Through sheer force of will, she remains on her feet. She swings herself out from the passenger door to face it square on—the huge, hideous wash of blood pooling between the grooves of the van's floor bed, the spray up and back along the far sidewall. 

Her throat closes. Anguish descends on her, infiltrating every cell of her body. She doesn’t know what to do. There’s nothing she can do. 

_Nothing useful, nothing useful, nothing useful._

The words march through her mind. She is paralyzed. Paralyzed, but she resists. 

“Lanie.” The rasp of her own voice snaps her back into body. The phone pressed to her ear is baffling. “Lanie. Can you come?” 

_“I’m on my way. Kate.”_ She can hear street noises. She can hear the way her friend’s words are chopped into pieces by her brisk, determined pace. “ _Listen to me. I am on my way.”_

Instantaneously and eternity later, she is there. She inhales sharply at the sight of the blood. It’s the sum total of the reaction she allows herself before she turns and takes Kate by the arms. 

“We do the work." Her voice is bleak, steady. “Kate. We find out what there is to find out. Right now, that’s what we do.”

“The work.” 

Her lips form the words, but there’s a white, shrill sound filling her head. It caroms back and forth between her ears. There is terror at the prospect of what the work will bring, and she wishes, she wishes, she _wishes_ she hadn’t teased him about the fucking pancakes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Blood. It’s dumb to end here, but I think my motivation to rewatch is just gone now. Hmmm


	16. Volumes—Hunt (5 x 16)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Walking through his own front door is harder than he ever thought it could be. The difficulty of it descends on him, strangely enough, only in the moment his fingers grasp the metal handle and he feels the immense weight of the physical act standing in for the sudden crash of emotions he—oh, he should have been sifting through them for the last nine hours or so. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Actually, this is the one where I stopped for a while (but eventually picked back up again).

Walking through his own front door is harder than he ever thought it could be. The difficulty of it descends on him, strangely enough, only in the moment his fingers grasp the metal handle and he feels the immense weight of the physical act standing in for the sudden crash of emotions he— _oh,_ he should have been sifting through them for the last nine hours or so. 

But he hasn’t been sifting through them for the last nine hours or so. He he has been watching his exhausted, traumatized, _alive_ daughter sleep as she hasn't since she was a small, small child. His attention has been singularly fixed on the miracle of that.

The door swings inward, and he somehow imagines rage on the other side—the mix of sorrow and absolute rage his mother specializes in when she is terrified for him. He imagines himself falling at her feet in contrition, because he _knows_ now. He knows. 

But there is nothing of the kind on the other side. There is the bright, comfortable home he knows and loves. There is a banner and a flurry of red hair as Alexis launches herself into his mother’s arms. There is a table laden down with pitchers of juice and heaping fruit bowls, not dour, shirt-sleeved agents hunched over gadgets. 

There is Kate and what seems like twice the distance around the waist of the world between them. His mind offers up every terrible thing he has said to her since this started, every unthinkable time has turned away, shut her out, shut down. It offers up every one. 

Time seems to stretch out in the instant he stands there, staring at her from the doorway, and then her arms are around him and he’s breathless with the ferocity of her embrace, the ferocity of her demand— _Please don’t do anything like that again without me, okay?_

He makes the vow readily, just as he suffers the whispered abuse his mother scatters between the kisses she peppers his cheeks with. He feels—if not lighter—more settled, more certain that they will weather this together, that he will have the chance to atone for the sins he would take back if he could, for the sins he would commit all over again to bring his daughter home. 

He lets his mother pull him toward the table. He feels a warmth deep in the center of his chest at the sight of Kate and Alexis with their arms twined around one another’s waists, whispering with their heads bent together as they make their way in the same direction. 

The sight of the package on the counter stops him. He feels, for a moment, weight pressing down on him as before. He knows, without question, that it is from his father. He knows hat he should pay it no mind in service of the thin and paltry cover story he is sworn to repeat. He knows without question that he will not—as he is supposed to do—keep this from his mother, keep this from Kate, ask his daughter to do this. 

He tears at the plastic mailer. A thrum of little-boy excitement runs through him at the air mail stamp, at his name in handwriting that belongs to a stranger. He smiles as the familiar, old-fashioned dust jacket slips free, and contemplates the pleasant weight of a beloved book in his hand. It’s followed hard on by something more complicated—anger and a surge of fear. How dare he then? How dare he now? But there Is loss, too. Little-boy loss and a wholly unexpected feeling of peace—completeness—in the tiniest part of his mind. 

It’s grotesquely complicated, what he feels, but the better part of them turns toward the light—toward the three women who are his world. 

_Mom, there’s something I want to tell you._

Kate tries to make her excuses almost immediately. Head down, voice low, she strikes out for the door. It hits all the hollow places that ached in the stretched out moment before she wrapped her arms tight around him. He catches her wrist. 

“Don’t go.” His voice is hungry and ragged. “Kate, please.” 

She nods. She stays. Her shoulders sag as she tries to make herself small, but she stays. 

He holds on to her hand to be sure. He leads her to the table and they all sink into chairs. His mother’s face is blank with amazement as he tells the story. Alexis is rapt. She is eager to hear anything of the man who saved her—her grandfather—and she reaches for his hand under the table when he softens the details to spare his mother, to spare Kate. 

Kate is . . . quiet. She schools her features into something carefully neutral. She nods from time to time, and he sees her fingers twitch as though she’d like a pen and the notebook she uses on the job. But overall, she is quiet. She is still. 

The story takes it out of them all. Alexis droops like a third-day lily. His mother leans against her. They both rise from the table, intent on heading upstairs. His mother lays a hand on Kate’s shoulder in passing. Alexis bends down and offers her a clumsy hug. He ushers them to the stairs. 

He watches them until they're hidden from view. He turns and finds Kate close at hand. She’s trying to make her excuses again. His eyes travel past her to the site of her embrace, her fierce extraction of a promise not that long ago. He is uncertain. He is overcome with dread. 

“You just . . .” She trails off. She gestures to the book he hadn’t realized he has tucked under his arm. “You have a lot to . . . process.” She looks miserable. She sounds miserable. “I’ll give you some space.” 

“I don’t want—“ He stoops to set the book on the landing. He makes a tentative reach for her hands. She lets him take them. She hangs her head. “Kate, I know . . . leaving like that. I know I was—” 

“You were what you needed to be.” She gives his hands a fierce squeeze. “Doing what you needed to do for Alexis.” 

Her tone is so definite, so _we are past this_ that he’s confused all over again. He’s weighted down with everything and he wants her to stay. He just wants her to stay, so he says so. 

“I do have a lot to work through.” He tugs their linked hands toward the book. “About him. About all of this. I mean. I have a dad. I never thought I could have a dad.” He’s surprised to feel tears welling up. He tells himself it’s exhaustion. He knows it to be grief for so many things. So many things. “Can you be here while I do?” 

She stiffens for an instant. She looks utterly surprised—utterly, but the moment is over almost before it begins. She steps into his body and wraps her arms tight around him. 

“I can be here,” she murmurs against his skin. “For whatever you want. For as long as you want, I can be here.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Had to finish out the two-parter, I guess? Stupid,Hmmm.


	17. Sexploitation—Scared to Death (5 x 17)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Go ahead. Take it,” he says. From the foot of the bed, kneeling up to loom, she lets the silence do its work. “I’m not,” he insists. “I’m not smiling.” 

“Go ahead. Take it,” he says. From the foot of the bed, kneeling up to loom, she lets the silence do its work. “I’m not,” he insists. “I’m not smiling.” 

She lowers the phone and arches an eyebrow. He is absolutely smiling with everything except his mouth. And he’s kind of smiling with his mouth. Two seconds go by and he is one hundred per cent smiling with his mouth. 

“This is why there are no murder board–worthy boudoir shots of you.” She flips the phone to fall where it may and makes her way on hands and knees toward the head of the bed. Two buttons and the long tails of one of his dress shirts are all that stand between her bare skin and the world. She bats the artfully arranged pillows aside and loops a finger beneath the short length of chain between the cuffs. “This is why we need these.” 

“I’m getting some mixed messages here, Detective.” He tips his head back to run an appreciative look all the way up her thigh. “Are these _not_ supposed to be a world of fun?” He clatters the cuffs together, and damned if there isn’t a merry, amusement park ring to them. He lets his eyes go wide and innocent. “Is it possible you’re doing it wrong?” 

“I’ll show you wrong.” She grabs a fist full of hair and kicks the covers off him. She slings her leg across his body. She pins his thighs just low enough for it to be frustrating for him. Mostly for him, and she has half a mind to do violence to these two buttons right here and now, but still he's smiling. 

She almost had him with the ice earlier. She assumes. She was too . . . preoccupied with the business of the ice to know for sure, but certainly the profanity, followed by wordless sounds of wild abandon, followed by this really gratifying descent into absolute silence suggests that she probably _did_ have him in the throes of smile-less ecstasy. 

Except maybe not, because here he is, pretty damned ecstatic beneath her, far gone enough that he's long since forgotten what he’s begging for. Here he is, biting his own lip hard enough to leave a white dent that lasts all through the next howl that comes roaring out of his body, and somehow he's still smiling. 

It’s not that she doesn’t want him to smile. She’s been a fan of his smile—all his smiles from Smart Ass to Dork of Unexpected Magnitude—for longer than she’d admit, even under the harshest interrogation tactics. And it’s not that it makes her feel undesirable. His smile is like having the world’s most supportive coach and most enthusiastic audience cheering her on to ever-greater heights. Which is a weird simile, under the circumstances. His smile—all his smiles—make her feel sexy and beautiful and powerful. 

But she’d like, just once, to catch him the way he catches her. He is, though she will never, ever admit it, the master of the boudoir shot. He springs the camera on her and makes her laugh—he catches her with her head thrown back, her body arching up toward a slash of light falling across the bed. He catches her in the afterglow, sprawled and sated with her hair falling across her face and one heavy-lidded eye peering up from the pillow. He’s caught her snarling at the camera as she flips his body beneath hers, and he’s caught her pleading for more, rattling the cuffs, surrendering. 

She only ever catches him smiling, and that's not quite the problem. For her—for the tattoo-sporting, motorcycle-riding Rebel Bex—the art of boudoir photography is . . . something a little guilty. She’d call it something a little naughty if she weren’t a grown woman and morally, if not actually legally, prohibited from using the word in reference to her sexuality. 

But she’s inhibited about it—on the photographer end, anyway. As a subject, she’s all about getting lost in her work, if his carefully curated albums are anything to judge by. But when she’s the one with her finger on the button, she’s inclined to stage him with artfully arranged pillows masking the cuffs. She’s inclined to stammer words that fall in the no-man's land between request, complaint, and command, and no wonder he doesn’t want to be remembered with the one shot she's managed to get in the last eight months that’s close enough to decent that she'd been able to tease him with it.

It doesn’t really bother her. Much. He’s smug about his prowess—at all levels of the game—of course, but it's not like she doesn’t get something out of it. It's not like his shots don’t start wonderful, loud, enthusiastic, ferocious cycle all over again every time she sees them. But she’d like to forget herself like he does. She’d like to capture _him_ forgetting himself, absolutely and totally. 

That’s what's on her mind as she lies, sleepless for now, with her body draped along his. His dress shirt has long since been cast off, and its buttons will live to fight another day. One heavy arm circles her waist, and the other, with a cuff still dangling from the wrist, is flung high over head. His face is slack, his hair plastered to his forehead. He is dead to the world and she’d like to try her hand at capturing him like this. 

She gropes behind herself and, miracle of miracles, comes up with the phone on her first try. She wriggles herself backward, trying to slide out of his grasp without disturbing the tableau. He grunts in his sleep, though. He clutches her body more tightly to his own. 

She decides it will have to do. 

She swipes the camera open and struggles to pull her head back far enough to center his face. The autofocus struggles along with her. She ducks into the shot for a second, hoping she can set up the composition, hold steady, and duck back out. But the image of the two of them snaps into immediate focus. She is mostly in shadow, and the slash of light through the slats of the blinds falls across his face perfectly. 

“Kate,” he murmurs. A shiver runs through his body. He groans and his mouth falls ope. “Ice,” he groans, the absolute picture of desire, as her finger comes down on the button. 

She’s done it. There he is in the afterglow, his desire sated. There she is, in shadow. Smiling. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Dumb, But I already burned the bucket list. Hmmm.


	18. Vita—The Wild Rover (5 x 18)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He thinks they should hold a wake for Detective Ryan’s late, lamented hair. He thinks it's vital, but the enthusiasm in the bullpen has been underwhelming so far. 

He thinks they should hold a wake for Detective Ryan’s late, lamented hair. He thinks it's vital, but the enthusiasm in the bullpen has been underwhelming so far. 

“What could _possibly_ be more culturally appropriate?” he asks. “An _Irish_ wake.”

He throws his hands wide and turns to Esposito for support. Esposito offers it, readily enough. 

“It _is_ a sad occasion, bro.” He shakes himself into a tense-limbed imitation of his partner. He manages a nose twitch and darts his eyes around the room before dragging his fingers through his own frustratingly short crop of hair. “What are you even gonna do with yourself when you see a honey and get all nervous?” 

He laughs and holds out his fist for a partners-in-shit-giving bump. Castle obliges, but Beckett steps in. 

“Children.” She _literally_ steps in, right between him and Esposito, still laughing, and Ryan, hanging his freshly shorn head. “I’m pretty sure there's only one honey on Ryan's mind, and he'd _much_ rather get home to her than spend another minute with you clowns.” 

“Clowns?” Esposito whips around to face Castle. He takes up the cue from her and plays it up like he’s genuinely offended. “Callin’ _us_ clowns? Take a look at your boy's head, Beckett.” 

Castle makes a show of comforting him. It gives Kate the moment she needs to take Ryan aside, to make sure he’s as okay as he can be at the moment, to tell him what he needs to know about whatever passed between her and Jenny before that harrowing call came down the line and the three of them rushed to the docks, not knowing what they'd find. 

Ryan’s eyes are on the floor throughout the short conversation. One hand rises as if to touch the close-cropped hairs at the nape of his neck, then falls. One hand rises and falls as if it’s not quite sure whose head this is on whose shoulders. He nods and nods again. He flinches at the sudden weight of Beckett's touch on his arm. He looks up, shocked at himself. With a final nod, with a wave to the two of them, he goes. 

“So.” She looks weary as she walks back toward the two of them. She looks as though she's lived hours—days—in the few short minutes the conversation has consumed. “Still set on this wake?" 

“Nah.” Esposito’s reply is quick. He’s read the weary vibe off her and he’s already heading for his desk. “Not the same with baldy running off to the missus.” 

"You've really got to get over that final rose ceremony,” Castle calls after him. “Be gracious in defeat." 

“Wake at home?” she says, bumping him with her shoulder as she passes him on the way to her own desk. 

“At home,” he agrees, a little thrilled—as always—at her word choice, a little surprised it’s made an appearance tonight. “A requiem for Ryan's hair can be arranged." 

She’s quiet on the way home. Just quiet, not the silent treatment she’s been giving him over the whole Jordan thing. He regards her from the passenger’s seat and thinks again that she looks tired. He pieces together her worry over Ryan, the heavy lifting with Jenny—and, belatedly, the fact that she was awake to hear him mutter Jordan fourteen different times. 

“She'll understand, won't she?” He only realizes after the fact how thinly veiled it sounds, how ambiguous. “Jenny. She’ll forgive him.” 

They're idling at a red light. Her faraway gaze is directed straight out through the windshield. 

“It’s a big ask,” she says quietly. It's not ambiguous. Her mind is on Jenny, on Kevin. There’s no sly dig or hint of malice. Her mind is on their friends. “She loves him. She knows what the job is sometimes. But expecting her to understand that there's more than a year of his life he's never told her about . . . it’s a big ask.” 

It is. He knows that. He understands suddenly that it’s a big ask she might make of him someday. Because wherever they're headed for the night, they call that home. Because she toughs it out when he's talking in his sleep. 

And the day may yet come when the job demands silence and secrecy and it kind of kills him to even _contemplate_ that there's something he won't get to know about her—that he won’t get to hang over every second of her life—and still he knows he'd understand, he’d forgive. 

They’re home, then. His arm is around her shoulders, and she’s weary enough to let it be, even though they're not in the building yet. He is pouring her wine and she is accepting it with a grateful sigh. She is sinking back into the couch cushions and he knows he has to tell her—he _wants_ to tell her—his stupid little story. He wants to tell her how he started out as an utter fraud. 

So he does, and his voice shakes and his hands tremble, because this is who he was once. This is who he still feels like so much of the time. He tells her and she teases him a little. She takes the sting out of it—the moment she left him hanging, but the memory, too. She drapes herself over him and kisses him. 

He is forgiven. And they are home. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The hair still shocks me. Hmmm.


	19. Venus—The Lives of Others (5 x 19)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She kicks him out of the bedroom the very second his tie is tied, the very second she has successfully tugged his jacket to rights along the line of his shoulders, the very second she has him settled in the chair, brace on, and that was a struggle. It is a struggle. He's still wheedling as she's literally shoving him, wheelchair and all, right out of the bedroom. 

She kicks him out of the bedroom the very second his tie is tied, the very second she has successfully tugged his jacket to rights along the line of his shoulders, the very second she has him settled in the chair, brace on, and _that_ was a struggle. It _is_ a struggle. He's still wheedling as she's literally shoving him, wheelchair and all, right out of the bedroom. 

“Are you sure I can’t—" 

“I am positive you can't just 'skip the brace’,” she lowers her voice in unflattering impression and makes the most sarcastic air quotes in the history of air quotes, “just because it's your birthday.” 

“That's mean,” he calls over his shoulder, still rolling. “I'm pretty sure that’s mean. Much like kicking me out of my own bedroom." 

“Your own bedroom.” She appears in the doorway. She needs to get underway, like, twenty minutes ago, but that calls for an appearance in the doorway. “Your own, you say." 

“ _The_ bedroom.” With an expert, one-handed move, he spins to face her and presents an innocent face. “ _Our_ bedroom. Birthday acoustics or something. I’m certain I said ‘our bedroom’." 

“Certain.” She huffs and turns on her heel. 

She battens down every hatch she can possibly batten down to guard the process—and it will absolutely be a process. She doesn’t want him nagging at her, peeking, catching her in her little rituals. She's holding out for magic.

It’s silly on her part. As he would remind her, he’s “seen her stuff.” More than that, he’s provided indispensable assistance on those occasions that she's been able to sound convincing when she tells him that if he tries one more time to undress her, rather than help her dress, she _will_ kill him. 

But he knows the ins and outs of the hook-and eye, the hidden zipper, and the art of disguising a bra strap. He knows his way around a hair pin, a hair tie, and several different flavors of braid. He’s handy with an eye pencil, lip pencil, and the finishing powder. He’s handy, but tonight she's a solo act. 

The hair comes first. It’s harder than it looked online, and she swears she can hear him chuckling at her cursing the flatiron and all its bastard line, But she wrestles it into submission. She brushes, she irons, she rolls and pins and smooths. And in the end, she may not be Grace Kelly, but she's satisfied with every one of the six-thousand angles the array of mirrors the cavernous en suite affords. 

Makeup is next—the dramatic retro eyes, dark, dark, dark at the lash line with shimmering bone-white shadow right beneath her brows. She dithers a little over the lip color. She’d like something bold, maybe carmine red, intense and fixed. But she looks to the waiting jewelry, laid out on velvet, and she follows her first instinct with a _sotto voce_ apology to Princess Grace as she paints on the nearly neutral shade with just a blush of pink in it. 

Last thing—the very last thing, she lifts an old-fashioned rounded box from the depths of the oversized make-up bag she’s working from tonight. She lifts the lid reverently and slides her fingers into the silk loop on the back of the puff. 

“A lady must take care,” she says to the mirror. This is her ritual on the rare occasion that the powder makes an appearance. 

It had been a gift—a joke her mom had presented with solemn fanfare the night before she left for Stanford. Her own grandmother had given her the self-same powder the night before _she_ went to college, informing her in stentorian tones— _Johanna, a lady must take care._ And she does. She dusts her throat and shoulders, her décollete with almost reverent care. 

The dress. The dress is a beast, truth be told. She pulls on her stockings and fastens the ankle straps on her teetery nude heels. She steels herself and prays to the crinoline gods for mercy as she steps into the bodice, wrestles the fullness of the skirt up her thighs, and attacks the practically out of reach zipper, until the bodice is tight and smooth across her chest, the waist falls exactly right. 

Jewelry is the finishing touch. Her mom’s simple teardrop pearl earrings, the twisted-strand bracelet she’d inherited from a great aunt. Clasps fastened, lever backs secured, she resists the urge to lift a hand to her hair. She takes a breath and faces herself in the mirror—really faces herself for the first time. There’s a gnaw of nerves rippling through her belly, her chest, even though it's good. Everything is exactly as she envisioned it, and it's _good._

She gathers her courage—because it’s silly, but she needs to gather up her courage—and unbattens the hatches. She's striding by the time she reaches the alcove that leads into the loft proper. She has her runway strut on and the little girl swish of the wide, wide skirt in counter point. Her teeter heels clack on the hardwood floor and he turns. 

He turns and this is the magic of it. It’s not good anymore, it's perfect. 

She is beautiful. In his eyes, in the boyish, breathless _Wow_ that is all he can mange, she is the only woman in the world. 

It’s magic. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The dress. Hmmm.


	20. Largess—The Fast and the Furriest (5 x 20)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Presents have, occasionally, been a problem. He loves to give them. She loves to give them. It’s on the receiving end that things can get tricky. Or could get tricky? That’s part of the problem: He’s not quite sure how to identify tricky. He's not quite sure of the rules about frequency, opulence, price point, conceptual complexity, MPAA rating. 

Presents have, occasionally, been a problem. He loves to give them. She loves to give them. It’s on the receiving end that things can get tricky. Or _could_ get tricky? That’s part of the problem: He’s not quite sure how to identify tricky. He's not quite sure of the rules about frequency, opulence, price point, conceptual complexity, MPAA rating. 

Actually, that last one is certainly not true: There are no rules about MPAA rating, as evidenced by the fact that from very early on she has been completely unabashed about gifts, big and small, that would make a lesser man bashful. And since his birthday, the penultimate gloves are off, as well. He has laptop files and notebooks and smart boards requiring Little-Miss-Nosy-defeating two-factor-authentication, and they're all just full of his nascent Rube Goldbergian plans to outdo her in revenge for his birthday. But the other aspects have been a problem—are still a problem. 

He had run into frequency problems almost right away—and initiation-of-gift-giving problems, come to think of it. Right after that first night, she’d made an offhand remark about the prevailing temperature in the loft, and he’d immediately had a brand new smart thermostat installed, one that supported an app compatible with her absolute dinosaur of a phone, that still supported the kind of security where not all users could see all other users with access. 

In retrospect, that one might’ve ticked all the problem boxes and invented some new ones, but in his heart of hearts, he still thinks he deserves _a little_ credit for not replacing her phone outright and adding her to the long-term friends and family plan. And in the darkest corner of his mind, he wonders if it hurt her that he took such measures to keep them in the closet with his mother and Alexis. He worries that she was somehow unaware that he absolutely wanted to shout it from the rooftops that they were together, starting with a rooftop very close to home indeed. 

And from there it was orchids—orchids enough to fill her apartment, rotated out and then back in again every few days. And then it was pure self-preservation to sprinkle in a reasonable, grown-up person’s coffee maker, sheets that had never seen a queen-sized futon or the inside of a dorm room, towels that wouldn’t chafe away all his favorite bits of her magnificent skin. 

So initiation, frequency, opulence _and_ price point—he has often stood guilty as charged. And he _certainly_ learned his conceptual complexity lesson on Valentine’s Day. (As for MPAA rating, a gentleman never tells, but she is certainly less concerned about infractions across the board for gifts in this category.) But he has gotten his share of heavy looks for all his many sins. Worse still, he has weathered those moments when what he just had to make a gift of has been too much or too soon or both and she shrinks into herself. He hates himself when that happens.

For her part, she has a gift for gifts that was apparent from early on. And he’s not speaking of gifts of the no-one-under-eighteen-admitted variety. He’s not _solely_ speaking of those. 

Before he’d even thought of the coffee maker for her place, she’d presented him, in bed and with great fanfare, with an oversized mug with with Writer stenciled in the same font as his vest all the way around the bowl. She had filled to the brim with coffee from fancier beans than she’d apparently been in the habit of bothering with at home. In retaliation for the towels, she’d gotten him an As Seen on TV TurbiTwist, and her _enough-with-the-orchids_ move had been a squirt to the face from a joke flower from Drake’s Magic Shop that she had then presented him with.

From there, it’s been a steady—and masterfully irregular—stream of thoughtful, charming things that have showed up at at the loft, her place, even the precinct, tucked away in her desk drawer, and it touches him. He is not used to—has never had occasion to become used to—a partner as thoughtful as she turns out to be. 

Meredith had her grand gestures, Gina her well-coordinated spectacles, and both had a tendency toward public display. Kyra was thoughtful with him, he was thoughtful with Kyra, but it had all the awkward tension of her old money and his new, wrapped up in the general stupidity endemic to the barely twenty crowd.

But he’s never before had the lovely intimacy of the kinds of gifts she gives, whether they're sincere or funny or both at the same time. And it turns out that he's not especially good at being on the receiving end. 

He’s touched every time, by every gift, to such an extent that even he, legendary softie that he is, blushes at it. He blurts out _You shouldn’t have, You don’t have to_ or he overplays the competition angle. He does any of a dozen other wrong, ungrateful-sounding things, and it's so stupid, because he loves everything about getting gifts from her. 

He’s getting better with practice. 

She gave him a bookmark just a few days ago. A really _good_ bookmark. It's wood, etched and dyed to look like the hilt of a light saber, and he didn’t tell her she wasn't allowed to get him anything so close to his birthday. He didn’t blurt out that she must feel _really_ guilty about not getting him a real one for Valentine’s Day. He _did_ blurt that it was the _coolest_ , and then he ran around fencing with it, complete with appropriate sound effects. And she had smiled that all-over smile that’s a little dorky and definitely in his top five favorites. So he's getting better. 

Or he was getting better. But now they're in bed and she's just snatched the Bigfoot book out of his hands, the one she's been needling him over. She's snatched it out of his hands, and even so—even though she’s a scandalous dog-earer of pages who doesn’t see the point in bookmarks—she slips that light saber bookmark out from where he’s tucked it against the back cover. She carefully slips it between the pages so he won't lose his place, and he honestly might cry at the sweetness of the gesture. 

He loves it so much, he honestly might cry, but thank God, she kisses him just in the nick of time. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Does it count if I, in all likelihood, hallucinated the bookmark? The bookmarks do exist, though. Hmm.


	21. Helix—The Squab and the Quail (5 x 21)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She’s standing in the middle of the main room of the Presidential Suite at the Fairwick hotel. She is looking left, looking right. There are two bedrooms and undeniable feeling of déjà vu. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Even in my disillusionment, I can't bring myself to do this story in the order that it was originally intended—after Still. So this is in the order the episodes aired in the US.

She’s standing in the middle of the main room of the Presidential Suite at the Fairwick hotel. She is looking left, looking right. There are two bedrooms and undeniable feeling of déjà vu. 

The sedate golds and creams of this room, the old school, low-hanging chandeliers, have nothing in common with literal glitz and garish colors of the four-star LA suite. And it’s the glass and steel jungle she knows and loves—not brown–grey desert scrub littered with pockets of artificial green—that fills the frame of the towering windows that make up nearly the whole of the wall straight in front of her. This setting has nothing to do with that setting, yet she chooses the bedroom on the left in some feeble attempt to break the tension wire in her mind that insists on connecting the two. 

There are fresh flowers. On the night stand, the telephone table, another end table, and all that's just in the bedroom less traveled by. Her rolling suitcase judders and escape her grasp as it comes to an awkward stop. It nearly topples, and as she turns to catch it, she clocks four more arrangements, minimum, in the main room. 

They're tasteful, of course. Cream roses and ivory lilies, huge, tight-fisted chrysanthemums, and peonies that look like pale cheeks with just a hint of pink in them. They’re all very nearly scentless in the way of shockingly expensive, tasteful arrangements, yet she feels like she's choking on their very presence. 

They do not come with the room. She is certain of that. She has another flash of LA memory, vivid, visceral.

_I’ve taken the liberty of setting up the suite just the way you like it._

It’s unnerving even as it gives her something to grasp at She said it herself—Vaughn could have any woman he wants. There's no possibility that he's interested in her, so there may be a Maurice at work behind the scenes who knows how to set the scene for a stay by any high-profile customer. Lilies and peonies and roses may be _de rigueur_ for a suite that will be occupied by Eric Vaughn. It may be that simple.

But as she white-knuckles the extended handle of her roller bag, she knows it's not. As she tries to get to work and Vaughn repeatedly tries to get personal, it’s patently obvious that it's not that simple. 

And that’s all before the champagne. 

He’s not an idiot. He sat across from Arthur Felder and watched the man die. The arrival of a room service cart practically groaning under the weight of who-knows-what delicacies is a clear statement that the close-quarter stay at the Fairwick is hardly even security theater. 

She wonders suddenly—knowing even in the moment that she doesn't really have to wonder—if there were flowers with Cindy in Singapore. She wonders if it was the “deep-seated feelings” that were not welcome in the Far East equivalent of the Fairwick’s Presidential Suite. 

He insists on securing the champagne and two glasses, thank you very much. She glimpses the label and swallows hard as she affirms that it's unfamiliar. It's decidedly outside even the high-end frame of reference she's developed over the last ten months. Memory flashes again. 

_Go ahead and cancel that. And get rid of the flowers and the champagne. We’re here to work._

She relives the wry sense of triumph from back then, the soupçon of disappointment as Maurice and his minion removed every trace of impropriety. It all swirls uncomfortably together with the rising tide of certainty that this has rapidly become about something more than just her doing her job. 

And then there is the ridiculous accident with the cork. Then she is telling him the version of the _I'm a cop, because . . ._ story she told Colin Hunt on a dance floor, the version of the _I'm a cop, because . . ._ story she told Josh in a dive bar, because Castle was with Gina, and Royce had just broken her already-broken heart. 

She’s telling him a very specific version of the story. The memory flash isn’t LA this time. It’s before that. It's forever ago. 

_And that, Detective Beckett, is why you're here._

_Cute trick. But don't think you know me._

She is tired all of a sudden. She is tired of this conversation and tired by the fact that however much work she has put into herself—into moving beyond her mother's murder—here she is again, having this conversation, doing this dance with temptation, saying it's complicated, it’s neither this nor that, _yeah, you could say it’s serious._

She’s tired, but she's angry, too, with herself and with Castle. She’s _embarassed_ that she's gotten embroiled in a conversation with Vaughn that she should have long since had with him.

She’s angry and afraid and Vaughn is like a detonator. This suite full of flowers, this champagne, this slick narrative that the blame for anything complicated about her life lies with Castle—it’s a terribly seductive kill switch. 

And it comes to that. It comes to honeyed words and the promise of a brutal end, but something decisive at last. It comes to that, Vaughn leaning in, his lips gliding over hers and she chooses chaos. She chooses fear and uncertainty and hard fucking work. 

“No.” 

She pushes him away. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Too many flowers. Hmmm.


	22. Mission—Still (5 x 22)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There’s so little time. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As with The Squab and the Quail, this story comes in the order the episodes aired in the US, not in the originally intended airing order.

_There’s so little time._

The thought is the sole occupant of his mind as steps over the threshold of Archibald Fosse’s hateful apartment. It exists in the global sense. He knows that. He knows all the contours and lightless crevasses of those four words—of that single thought—but that aspect is sealed away. He simultaneously refuses to acknowledge it and thinks of nothing else. 

It's the immediate sense that moves his feet, quickens his pace as soon as he is absolutely sure he's out of earshot. She will not—will _not_ —hear the sound of his footsteps rushing away. He doesn't rush, isn't rushing, even when he’s sure she can't hear. Even though there's so little time and he has so much to do, he moves . . . efficiently, methodically. 

He has a series of essential tasks to complete, and the sequence is important. He hits the silver push bar on the building's back door and blinks in the sunlight. The alley is empty, it’s almost entirely empty, and for a moment—for a blissful moment—he thinks he's been dreaming. Realization hits, the meaning of the empty alley—Mahoney has pulled everyone back. 

_There's so little time._

The truth lands hard, and he distantly knows his heart is a ragged thing, but it doesn't matter. He has things to do. He strides to the perimeter. He swears he can feel the sweeping red lights of the firetrucks raking across his body, but that's distant, too. He is thought, plan, action. 

This isn’t the end of the street he'd have headed for, if he had his choice. The diner with the lattes, with the goat cheese omelette, is the other way. But there's a coffee shop. It’s New York, and there's always a coffee shop. 

He slips through the line of firefighters, paramedics, regular uniformed officers and the armored personnel of Mahoney’s unit. He’s not sure he draws a single eye. It's curious how densely packed the scene still is. It's curious, given the seconds slipping away. 

There’s no line at the coffee shop counter. It's a mercy, and he comes away with two black coffees. It's not the kind of place that has lattes, just a pot on a burner and the blue cups with the Greek key design. The paper is thin. It burns his hands, like it always does, but that's one task down. 

He heads back to the perimeter. He strides with purpose, hardly registering the knot of cops converging on him, their hands and voices raised to tell him that he needs to get back. He feels a ripple of something—irritation, agitation, pity. He is crossing this perimeter, and he literally has no time to waste on anyone who thinks otherwise. 

He calls out for Mahoney. The man does him the grace of coming right over. His voice—already remarkably soothing, especially given his line of work—ticks down another notch. He delivers the same message—everyone well behind the line. 

But he holds up coffee cups as though it’s an explanation. He utters the bare minimum of words. He juggles one scalding cup into the crook of his left elbow, taking care not to crush it, pop the lid, send it coursing down his own body. He simple holds out his hand. Mahoney, to the great consternation of everyone, sets the detonator on his outstretched palm. Item two, down. 

He makes his way back toward the building. He’s about to juggle the coffees again to free his hand up to get the door, but it pops open of its own accord. The next wave of Mahoney’s personnel. Everything but the skeleton crew, and they'll be streaming out soon enough. 

He meets no resistance as he slips through the door. Mahoney must have radioed ahead, and he's grateful for the precious few seconds the gesture wins him back. With the dank stairwell to himself, he sets the coffees on a corrugated metal step. He spends the few precious seconds on a deep breath.

His phone presents him with the clock ticking down. So little time, but he's calm. He's still calm as he speed dials Alexis. She’s in class. Her phone will be on silent. It's for the best. 

It’s for the best, but her voice, warm and bright despite the canned quality of the recording, stings. He tells her loves her, that she should take care of her grandmother, that he hopes she’ll understand some day. He ends the call and dials his mother. It’s easier and harder, somehow. It’s a blessed relief and a soul-lacerating disappointment that he gets her voicemail, too. He tells her to take care of Alexis, tells her he loves her, tells her he has to do this. Has to. 

The timer ticking down fills the screen again. He is calm. There's so little time, but he is here, climbing the stairs, with a coffee in each hand, one balanced somewhat precariously on the back of the remote. 

He climbs the stairs. He retraces his steps down the hall. He steps over the threshold and she takes his breath away. With her face turned up, as if to drink in the sun, she is beautiful, serene. He steps over the threshold and takes his place by her side. 

There’s so little time, but come what may, this is where he'll spend it. 

_Hey. What are you doing? Napping?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: The sad little coffees. Hmm. 


	23. To the Quick—The Human Factor (5 x 23)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not a lie that she's told him. It's nothing. That’s literally true. It’s a three-minute conversation with a guy she doesn't much like and whose validation she certainly doesn't need. It’s someone noticing that she's good at her job—that she is not about to be shut down by interference from higher-ups more concerned with saving face than seeing justice done. It really is nothing. 

It’s not a lie that she's told him. _It's nothing_. That’s literally true. It’s a three-minute conversation with a guy she doesn't much like and whose validation she certainly doesn't need. It’s someone noticing that she's good at her job—that she is not about to be shut down by interference from higher-ups more concerned with saving face than seeing justice done. It really is nothing. 

Still, she nurses a bit more of her wine, even though she can hear the distant hiss of the shower and the indistinct rumble of whatever ridiculous show tune he is belting out tonight. She wants to join him. She _will_ join him. She just . . . needs a minute, even though it's nothing. 

It is, at best, a moment’s fantasy, and it's not even about Stack. She spins the stem of her wine glass slowly between her fingers, letting her unfocused gaze follow the flames of the gas fire dancing in the swirling liquid. The image—gold flickering on garnet—gives something permission to surface in her mind. 

The search for her mother's killer is over. The struggle to bring him to justice is . . . a work in progress, at best—a lost cause at worst. The reason she became a cop is behind her, and she is more than her mother's case. She looks around this room she loves and sees the evidence that she is. She closes her eyes and listens close. She picks up a snatch of “Can’t Help Lovin’ That Man of Mine" in the exaggerated voice he calls his shower baritone and laughs to herself. 

Her heart is here—in this home, in an astonishingly perfect shower, if she can pry herself off the couch—and maybe she should do some thinking about where her career is going. Maybe that’s something that’s been at the edge of her mind ever since she pulled off that bluff with Bracken, ever since she clipped her badge back on after her suspension. Maybe it’s something she should be looking at head on, but the conversation with Stack is nothing. 

It’s not a lie she's told. It’s not even a secret she’s keeping. 

She swallows the last of her wine. She carries the glass to the sink and sees he's left the bottle uncorked on the kitchen counter. She takes the time to seal it up with the fancy gadget that pulls the air out of it. She straightens up a little, dithering until a sudden shift in the atmosphere stops her in her tracks. 

It’s the shower, the absence of its pleasant rhythm, and she startles, looking down at the open drawer of dishtowels she's been fussing with. Stalling, she realizes, and it doesn't make any sense that’s she’s . . . what? Stalling? Avoiding? 

It just doesn’t make sense. She shuts the drawer, harder than she needs to. She hurries across the living room and through the bedroom, stripping off her blazer as she goes, tossing it in the general direction of the bedside chair. She grabs hold of the hem of her turtleneck, tugging it awkwardly up and over her head as she barrels through the bathroom door. 

“Hey.” He seems to be surprised to see her—as if he hadn’t invited her to join him. 

“You’re done already," she says more snappishly than she intends to. 

There’s a puzzled look on his face as he meets her eyes in the mirror. She catches sight of herself in the mirror. Her cheeks are flushed and she's decidedly disheveled, standing there in her bra and work pants, with her sweater pressed against her middle. She looks guilty of something. 

“I'm sorry. It’s just . . . it’s been a while.” He turns toward her with his hands out. “I figured you were just unwinding with your wine, but if you want, I’m happy to—“ 

"What's this?” She drops the sweater on vanity and snatches at his left hand before it closes around her wrist. There's a bright bloom of blood slashing right across the pad of his finger. “Castle, what happened?" 

‘Warburg’s quad. Started bleeding again while I was soaping up, I guess” 

He shrugs it off, but he's giving her a sidelong look. Her reaction is strange. It's over the top, but she can't stop herself. She can't seem to to find her equilibrium. The realization pushes it even further away. 

“This looks deep.” She tugs him closer to the lights around the mirror. “You might need a stitch.” 

“Kate,” he laughs, but there's the sidelong look again. “It’s fine.”

“It's _bleeding.”_ Her voice bounces off the tiles, startling them both. She ducks her head. Her chin hits between her collar bones and she can feel the thudding of her heart against her ribs. “It’s . . . not really bleeding any more.” 

“Not really." She drops his hand, but he catches hers. He tips his head to the side and bends down to catch her eye. “But if you’d like to do the honors with the Snoopy bandage, our organization is currently looking to hire a naughty nurse.” 

“Naughty.” She shakes her head. “That’s a shame. I only do stern.” 

He flashes a wide grin at her. She's managed to recalibrate. She's matched his tone and pressed down hard on the strange, rattling feeling the word _hire_ wants to call up. 

“Well, stern might work.” He steps in close to her. “Especially with your skill set." 

“My skill set?” She arches an eyebrow and presses herself in to his body. She wriggles and makes a show of reaching far behind him for the band-aids, the antibiotic ointment, et cetera. “Oh, you haven't begun to see my skill set, yet.” 

It goes on like that. She turns the act of wrapping an honest-to-God snoopy band-aid around the tip of his finger into an act of foreplay. He plays the swooning patient. They work their way out of the bathroom and fall into bed, laughing, panting, pawing at one another. 

He falls immediately into sleep afterward, his left hand with the Snoopy band-aid resting comfortably on her hip. She lies awake a long time, feeling unsettled. Feeling stupidly anxious. 

“It’s nothing,” she murmurs. 

He stirs, soft as the words are. she strokes the hair back from his forehead and lulls him back to sleep. She lies awake, telling herself it's not a lie, it’s not a secret, and it isn’t. Her thumb brushes over the Snoopy band-aid, and something inside her clenches. Something inside her offers up the words for it—the conversation with Stack, the things she is not saying. 

It’s a wound. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Castle has no regular band-aids. Ever. Hmm.


	24. Gauntlet—Watershed (5 x 24)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Every Nikki Heat book has had its own miseries. The first time she sent him away. We're done. The second time he left her with a juvenile Now she’ll see band-aid slapped on his wounded heart and bruised ego. The third time. Roy. Her eyes slipping closed under that scorching blue sky. The excruciating shrillness of the monitor going flat line in the ambulance. Nothing can touch that agony—nothing—but the fourth time certainly gave it a run for its money. I remember every second. How am I even supposed to trust anything that you say? 

Every Nikki Heat book has had its own miseries. The first time she sent him away. _We're done._ The second time he left her with a juvenile _Now she’ll see_ band-aid slapped on his wounded heart and bruised ego. The third time. Roy. Her eyes slipping closed under that scorching blue sky. The excruciating shrillness of the monitor going flat line in the ambulance. Nothing can touch that agony—nothing—but the fourth time certainly gave it a run for its money. _I remember every second. How am I even supposed to trust anything that you say?_

But this year is different. There's no misery here at all. Hell, after living through last year’s misery—through estrangement, reunion, and her second solo near-death experience in less than a year—he had written like a fiend, right through the end of _Frozen Heat_ and straight into _Deadly Heat_ , deftly weaving serial killer into the fabric of the story where Nikki will finally, triumphantly, bring the people responsible for her mother’s murder to justice. 

Of course he's procrastinated. Of course he has stalled and rested on his laurels. He’s seduced her over and over again, slipping his hand beneath her prim work blouses, the tall waist of her running tights, the slouchy irregular hem of any one of the t-shirts she's commandeered from his baskets full of clean laundry. He’s laid her out on the bed and parted her thighs and stepped between them as she leans back with her palms planted flat on his desk. He has whispered brags about his word count—about how far ahead of the game he is this year—and convinced her to idle away the hours with him. 

Ultimately, of course, he's frittered away the jump he has on the book. So there's _some_ misery now. There are nights away from her. There is sudden, absolute longing at 3 AM, and he can't call her. He can't head to her place and slip between the sheets, even though she does. She certainly does when she's working late, and there's _occasional_ misery about the fact that it doesn't quite work both ways. 

But it’s manufactured misery. All of it, really. It's him playing for sympathy and her playing along to such an extent that it surprises her as much as it surprises him.

It’s manufactured misery when the cover art shows up. Black Pawn has messengered it over, and no matter how long he's been at this—no matter how many zeros there are when the papers publish an estimate of his net worth—he puffs up like a proud, important little boy when something arrives by messenger. 

It's a little after 7 AM when he send the spandex-clad, helmet-wearing messenger on her way with a tip big enough to win him a genuine smile from someone who is obviously not a morning person. It’s 7:15 AM when he realizes he's in crisis. Magenta or green. The choice is impossible, and he's leaning toward rewriting the whole thing—serial killer out, New York–hating mutant lizard in. It’s a genuine crisis and it’s not too early to call her, so he does. 

Her voice mail picks up immediately. It’s a crushing blow in the moment, so he eats cold pizza straight out of the fridge. He gives it ten minutes and calls again. Voice mail, and the crisis expands. It fills the whole loft and where _is_ she? He calls again. He walks around the office, trying to sneak up on one cover, then the other, one cover, then the other. 

He settles for Alexis and her crisis-management skills. It’s kind of a bust. She is not at all interested in his crisis, and there's some definite misery there. She wants to go. She _is_ going and his dithering is silly. It’s utterly ineffectual, and now he really does have something he needs her for—Kate. He needs her level-headed, slightly snappish input, and he needs the way she'll put up with him. 

She does put up with him. She’ll pinch him in the most unexpected places and tell him he’s being ridiculous. But she'll kick off her shoes and prop her legs on the coffee table, too. She'll pat her thigh and let him rest his head there. She’ll listen to him and press her hand over his heart when it thuds with waking nightmares about Paris. 

She’d do all that if only she'd answer her phone. 

* * *

He is on the verge of throwing the wood-mounted cover art right through the glass wall of his office. This isn't misery—it's rage, and it is not his native tongue. He slams the square blocks, one after the other, on to his desk. It’s hard enough to mar the surface, forceful enough that wood will bear the scar, and native tongue or not, that feels about right. 

His mother finds him as is her wont in these moments. She acts out the first few seconds of her scandalized routine before she catches up with the world as it is. She clutches her metaphorical pearls until she realizes this is serious, this is different, this is rage. 

He tells all. He scorches the air as he recounts each lie, repeats each ice cold justification she’d tried to spin. He makes his unassailable case as the injured party, and his mother turns the world on its head. 

_She should be interviewing for that job_ , she says, and he wants to scream that he's not fucking saying otherwise. He’s not some _Mad Men_ –style troglodyte trying to keep the little lady at home. He wants to scream, but this is his mother and she rolls on, ever forward. 

_This isn’t about me_ , he does manage to shout, and she turns that on its head, too: _Are you sure?_

And he is not. He listens to her recitation of the long road to this moment. He relieves every misery along the way—his sins and hers. His pride and hers. His stupidity, cowardice, tragic lack of moxie in the moments that have really mattered. And hers. 

His hand goes to his phone in his pocket. He feels sore and kicked around now when he thinks about how she didn't answer all this morning. How she lied right to his face when he asked. How she lied. He feels sore and kicked around, but the rage is gone. 

He leaves his mother. 

He sits behind his desk, stiff-spined and well and truly miserable. He navigates, mechanically, the interaction with Alexis. He writes the check. He pastes on a smile she doesn't buy and tells her to go have fun. She leaves him, unnerved, and he is sorry. He’s _sorry_. 

He flips the cover art face up. He places the green at the far right edge of the desk, the magenta at the far left. He spends some quality time with the giant lizard that would happily chow down on New York and all its denizens, himself included. He spends a good long while on team giant lizard. 

But he'd ache for her even then. Chewed up and swallowed down, in the belly of a giant lizard, he'd ache for her, just as he had that first summer, all the while with Gina, after Roy and watching her die, every time—every minute—he had ached for her, and the misery here and now seems so much of his own making. _Their_ own making, he knows, but his actions—his choices—are the only thing he can control. 

He turns the giant green lizard face down. The gentle sound of wood meeting wood calls up something ultimately kind. It calls up her voice—strong as she could make it—and the pointed way she’d set the book on the table in front of him. 

_Kate. You can make it out to Kate._

There's courage, too. Every step of the way, all mixed up with anger and stubborn pride and sheer stupidity, there is courage between them. There is grace and forgiveness and monumental effort to work their way back to each other. There is the kind of love he has never had before. 

The phone rings just then. Exactly just then, and he is decided. He answers with his own name, clipped to sharp edges by fear, by misery, by determination. She says they need to talk. He says they do. 

"The swings,” he says and nothing more. 

_“The swings,”_ she echoes back, right away, and he can’t bear to hope it's an omen. 

He can’t bear to hope at all, but he unearths the ring he has had for longer than he can admit, even to himself. He plucks it from its silk-and-velvet depths and slips it, naked, into his pocket. This is his path out of this misery. He can't bear to hope she’ll join him on it. He can't bear to hope at all. 

But he is decided. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N:Ugh. Got away from me. Bad. Hmm. 


End file.
